Want to start this business with me?

My appearance on the My First Million has gone viral. If you haven’t seen it yet, get it here. They created a fun show.

The podcast is popular because Sam & Shaan bring proven entrepreneurs to riff on new business ideas, which got me to think that I should occasionally share some of my business ideas with my readers.

So today's email will be an idea I JUST can't get out of my head.

At a minimum, it will help you see how I think about business ideas.

At maximum, maybe someone wants to build it with me next year!

AI is all the rage.  Everyone says it will transform the world.  And I believe them.  Most CMOs and marketing leaders believe them too.

There are TONS of marketing-related software companies that claim their AI (for creative, email, data analysis) will change the game.

And yet, most companies I interact with are having trouble configuring GA4 (a relatively basic, free analytics software).  Why?

While there's a lot of demand to AI-ify marketing, there is extremely little know-how and very few resources to actually make this a reality.

Do you see it, yet?

No? Maybe this will help:

A good friend of mine, Narinder Singh, sold his company Appirio for $500M.

His business idea was simple:

There was a proliferation of cloud-based software (like Salesforce and Atlassian), but companies had no idea how to set up the software, configure it, and use it for success.

That's it.  That was his business idea.

He’d go into companies, and use a combo of proprietary tech and services to make sure cloud software worked perfectly for his clients.

I want to start this for AI and, specifically, for Marketing AI software.  I think it’s a multi-billion dollar idea.

I'm sure there are tons of frameworks.  What has worked for me is:

At Gateway X, my venture studio, I learned something else that is critical for creating a business: An Unfair Advantage.

This one should be pretty obvious, but I have a massive network of 2000+ CMOs and other marketing leaders.  I also have two other businesses (GrowthAssistant and Aux Insights) that regularly interact with marketers.

So, getting the clients would be straightforward (notice that I didn't say easy… haha).

To start, I'd sell to companies that were big enough to pay (it's a bit of a luxury), while still being small enough that they could greenlight it in weeks, not months.  That's Series B-D growth stage companies.

As we got better, I'd go up market to F1000 companies (charge more, do bigger projects).

I'd need to do some research, but off the top of my head, I'd target $25-50K scopes of work. We’d set up ChatGPT, Perplexity, Jasper AI, etc for specific marketing use cases (sending emails, ad creative, internal presentations, etc.).

I'd want to show that my fees pay for themselves during the engagement by cutting costs/improving efficiencies and driving results.  I'd then sell $5-10k ongoing support retainers.

Whatever I sold, I'd want to make sure I could deliver consistent results at high gross margins (65%+).  I'd consider building tech that helped solve problems (after a year or so of learning the problem space better).

I want someone who has lived and breathed this exact problem.

There are a few critical pieces to this:

1. They know AI cold.

2. They’re up to date on the latest trends, know all the tricks, etc.

3. They’ve done several of these kinds of implementations in other contexts. (Ideally, the person worked at a firm like Appirio, so they know how those relationships work.)

4. They have client services experience.

5. They can set up the "ops" part of the business.

6. They have the entrepreneurial rigor.

You can read more about what I think makes an ideal CEO in this past newsletter.

That kind of CEO’s unfair advantages paired with mine would lead to AMAZING growth.

After getting the basics in place: (a name, a website, a short slide deck), our goal would be to build a stable business doing $100K/month in profit.

If the average engagement is $33K per quarter, that means we’d need 20 projects per quarter.  That's $660k per quarter, $220k per month with relatively high margins.

We’d work backward from that 20 projects per quarter.  My guess is that we’d need to get into at least ~40 "deep discussions." This likely means over 100 first calls/mtgs with my ICP per quarter. (Remember my 3 M’s: Meetings are the only Metric that Matters.)

This would be my first order of business: taking those 100 meetings as soon as I could alongside the CEO.

First, we'd probably close 5-10 of these and then learn how to actually deliver the service.

Once we did that, we'd have a sense of all the unknowns:

How to sell it, how long it takes to close, how price-sensitive people are, how much servicing our clients cost, etc…

This whole cycle would probably be 6-12 months.  THEN, we could actually make a business plan :)

So, how BIG could this be?

• According to Google, In the US, there are 62,000 businesses with revenue between $25-100M in revenue. My goal would be to get 1000 of those using me annually… at $50k each, that's $50M a year :).

• As we build a brand and reputation, I'd go for much bigger deals! Appirio is doing multi-million dollar implementations.

So, there you have it…

Who wants to start it with me??

-jesse