May 22, 2024 · 41m · startup-ideas
3 startup ideas using data/trends to get you paid (steal these $300k/month ideas)
0:00 / 0:00
▶ Watch on YouTube →
gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Nicolas Cole, Greg Isenberg, and Dickie Bush explore high-yield startup opportunities driven by data arbitrage, breaking down a blueprint for dominating Amazon's Lit RPG publishing niche and detailing agency-powered venture incubation models.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Greg holds 31.8% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Greg as informed peer 5.2 Guest teaching 4.3 Guest disagreement 1.5 Greg pushing back 0.9
speaking balance: gold is Greg, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 29:13 Dickie challenges Cole's OnlyFans reading audience
Dickie directly rejects Cole's premise by noting OnlyFans audiences are predominantly male while readers are female, creating the exact same demographic hurdle.
Hardest push from Greg ▶ 11:54 Dickie questions Twitch gaming and book reading overlapDickie interrupts the excitement around Greg's Twitch streamer idea to challenge the foundational assumption that gamers who watch live streams read books.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 20:00 Cole reveals six-figure monthly LitRPG economicsCole breaks down the revenue potential of Amazon's Kindle Direct subgenres for Greg, citing monthly figures between $100k and $300k per title.
Greg holds their own ▶ 39:26 Greg details utilizing agency bench capacity for incubationGreg demonstrates deep operational expertise, explaining how 70% standard agency utilization leaves 20-30% of paid talent to build proprietary projects for free.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Greg as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Greg pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capturing Startup Concepts and Frictionless Idea Logging | 3 | 7 | 1 | 0 | Nicolas Cole introduces the concept and economics of the LitRPG genre on Amazon Kindle Unlimited, explaining how page-read monetization works to Greg, who is completely unfamiliar with the genre. | |
| Sponsor Break: Accelerating Organic Search Traffic with BoringMarketing | 5 | 6 | 2 | 1 | After an ad break, Bush and Cole break down the Publisher Rocket research tool and the strategy of flooding subcategories rather than hopping between single keywords. Greg proposes building internal proprietary SaaS versions of these research tools. | |
| Analog Twitch: Partnering with Streamers and Expanding Readership | 6 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Greg introduces an original thesis calling LitRPG 'analog Twitch' and suggests partnering with major Twitch streamers to license their names for book series. Dickie questions the audience overlap between Twitch viewers and book readers. | |
| Gen Z Media Consumption and the Anti-Tech Reading Counterculture | 5 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Greg shares his contrarian thesis that Gen Z reading will rebound as an anti-tech counterculture, contrasting immersive gaming addiction with physical books while the guests discuss Wattpad and social media usage trends. | |
| Female Lit RPGs, Binge Consumption, and Category Economics | 2 | 8 | 1 | 0 | Cole walks Greg through the unit economics and female demographic dominance in romance/Kindle Unlimited binging, detailing how top indie books generate hundreds of thousands in monthly revenue. | |
| Execution Leverage, Operator Dynamics, and Mini Idea Labs | 6 | 2 | 1 | 2 | The conversation shifts to execution leverage and startup studios. Greg shares an anecdote about hiring business operators and argues for spinning out internal mini idea labs funded by cash flow rather than S&P indexing. | |
| Hollywood Studio Royalties, IP Valuations, and AI Workflows | 6 | 6 | 2 | 1 | Cole reveals how fiction IP can be optioned to film studios for massive upfront valuations and explains AI writing workflows. Greg builds upon this by discussing acquisition multiples and technology layers. | |
| OnlyFans Ghostwriting Pitches and Overcoming Skill Deficiencies | 4 | 2 | 3 | 2 | Cole playfully suggests an OnlyFans tell-all ghostwriting agency, which Dickie immediately challenges on male readership demographics and creator revenue trade-offs. Greg and Dickie joke about the pitch. | |
| Proprietary Competitive Analysis Tools and Portfolio Positioning | 7 | 3 | 1 | 0 | Greg shares his framework for building internal competitive analysis tools (referencing GummySearch and EtsyHunt) to exploit platform data rather than selling low-priced public SaaS subscriptions. | |
| Trends for X Paid Newsletters and Agency-Powered Idea Incubators | 8 | 2 | 1 | 0 | Greg explains how his agency portfolio acts as an internal incubator using surplus 30-40% operational capacity to test ideas at zero marginal cost. Dickie and Cole express admiration for the model. |
Statements from this episode (19)
Cole: Publish novel genres widely, niche books on Kindle Unlimited
“If you're creating something new, you publish it wide, but if you're creating something really niche, ah, you should look at the existing categories in Kindle Unlimited, and then basically, like, try and stay in that category, and then you're just playing the …”
Cole: Lit RPG on Amazon has far more readers than writers
“What's so interesting about this subcategory on Amazon is that there's way more readers than there are creators. There's a lot more people who want to read lit RPGs than there are people writing it.”
Cole: Top Lit RPG books generate $250,000 per month
“There are lit RPG books right now doing like a quarter million a month.”
Nicolas Cole: Dominating Amazon Niches Requires Catalog Density Over One-Offs
“The mistake that I see is one is the person sees that opportunity and then goes, okay, I'm just going to go write one book for that keyword or that subcategory, and then I'm going to do it again in a different subcategory And then do it again. And then do it a…”
Isenberg: An AI rush will flood LitRPG with low-quality books
“There's going to be the AI rush to create, you know, people are going to create these books with AI and stuff like that. And it's going to be like low to medium quality.”
Cole: Roughly two-thirds of all book readers are female
“The majority of readers are female, like two-thirds of all readers are female, not male”
Cole: Instagram's CEO stated direct messaging is the app's most used feature
“The Instagram CEO went on some podcasts and he was like, yeah, the most used feature on Instagram is not the feed, not the Explorer, but it's DM. Because Gen Z and young people are just sending content to each other in their DMs all day”
Isenberg: Gen Z Book Reading Will Double by 2029 via Anti-Tech
“If, you know, 10% of Gen Z reads now, I think in the next five years, 20% reads. And I think it's because it's the shift around anti-tech, but I do think that the vast majority of them are just going to be, like, I grew up in a Call of Duty world, it's just ha…”
Nicolas Cole: The gender split in gaming is now roughly fifty-fifty
“One of the growing trends in gaming is that more and more women are coming into the category. So it used to be, or at least the perception was, like, eighty-twenty, you know... And but now it's like fifty-fifty.”
Nicolas Cole: Kindle Unlimited subscribers read 8 to 12+ books monthly
“Kindle Unlimited subscribers... Read something like eight to 12 plus books a month”
Nicolas Cole: Talented writers rarely analyze market data before writing
“I think it's not writers that do that. I think it's entrepreneurial people who do that. And then they are just like, and I'm just going to write to fulfill on the demand. But I think the people who are actually talented at writing almost never think about this”
Bush: Portfolio founders should delegate execution to operators to protect risk-reward
“And I think from a portfolio company perspective, that's where you want to get to. Because right now you go, I'd have to write it. I'd have to do the research. I'd have to, and it's just not worth the upside. The risk reward relative to the other opportunities…”
Isenberg: Fund operators directly for upside rather than only buying index funds
“So you take, instead of investing, you know, into the S and P you find an operator and you use data to inform some of these bets and you like, this is a perfect bet where it's like, okay, if I'm going to invest five, four grand a month, three grand a month, sh…”
Nicolas Cole: Top Fiction Authors Make 10x More Than Top Nonfiction Authors
“If you look at the best-selling nonfiction authors, James Clear, Mark Manson, whatever, they are a 10th of the best-selling fiction writers. The IP value is astronomically different, you know.”
Nicolas Cole: Real Publishing Value Lies in Training Niche-Specific AI
“Because I think the real value is you build a niche library, and then you train AI on how to write that specific subject.”
Nicolas Cole: Romance is ten times bigger than any other book genre
“Romance is the biggest literature category. It literally is 10 times bigger than the next biggest category.”
Isenberg: Niche Scraping Tools Suffer From Broken Price Discrimination
“People pay a monthly fee, but it's one of those things where the price discrimination is completely wrong. Like, I don't remember exactly what Etsy hunt charges, but it's probably like less than 50 bucks a month. But if you create a killer, like there's some E…”
Isenberg Uses Service Agencies as Internal Idea Labs for Ventures
“That's one of the reasons why I built a bunch of agencies, is because like, now my agencies are my idea labs. I have a design agency when I need designs. I have an SEO agency when I need SEO. I have an ad agency when I need ads. I have a, you know, community t…”
Isenberg: Good Agencies Run at 70% Productivity, Leaving Capacity for Ventures
“No agency works at a hundred percent productivity. Good agencies work at 70% productivity at best. So realistically, if you're at 40 or 50%, you can use that 20, 3040, 50% on your own projects, and you don't have to pay for it.”