The Startup Ideas Pod

I'm joined by Soren Iverson, Designer at Cash App and the indisputable idea machine of the internet. We talk about building products that spread like wildfire, how to test business ideas before launch, how to build a memorable brand, and more. 

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Episode Timestamps

0:00 How to build better products
01:42 Best ideas for hardware/physical products in 2024
16:31 How to test your product ideas
23:11 How to build an appealing brand
31:20 Digitizing the real estate experience
42:22 Best startup opportunities in the design space
53:45 Where to find Soren

Creators & Guests

Host
GREG ISENBERG
I build internet communities and products for them. CEO: @latecheckoutplz, we're behind companies like @youneedarobot @boringmarketer @dispatchdesign etc.

What is The Startup Ideas Pod?

This is the startup ideas podcast. Hosted by Greg Isenberg (CEO Late Checkout, ex-advisor of Reddit, TikTok etc).

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Soren Iverson [00:00:00]:
Rather than starting with question of, how can I make this thing better? Most of my work starts with, why does this suck so bad? And like, how could I make it suck more? I wasn't necessarily creating a product. I was creating the medic content, exacerbating the pain that people feel. You'll often understand parts of the experience or patterns that lead to that pain, and then you can reverse engineer and kind of do the opposite and make it better. Almost anything is. It takes a lot of experimentation and a lot of throwing stuff against the wall to figure out what's going to get a response. If you're working on something and you don't want to put your name on it from the beginning, you should probably reconsider whether or not you actually want to be working on it, because you should be proud to put your name on stuff you work on.

Greg Isenberg [00:00:44]:
Soren Iverson. I've been looking forward to this call for a while. You are the idea machine of the Internet. Admit it. Just admit it.

Soren Iverson [00:00:55]:
Yeah, the idea guy.

Greg Isenberg [00:00:56]:
Oh, there he is. Excited to chat for people who don't know him. He goes on Twitter, he takes apps that people use, and then he kind of remixes it with new ideas, and they get thousands of likes and laughs.

Soren Iverson [00:01:14]:
Yeah, we're optimizing for chuckles as much as we are engagement. I don't know. I think some of the funniest ones are the ones that get the least online traction. But you can't always have bangers.

Greg Isenberg [00:01:28]:
Yeah, you can't always have bangers. We hope for bangers, but today we are on the ideas podcast, and of course, you brought some banger ideas, and I just want to spend some time to jam with you on them.

Soren Iverson [00:01:41]:
Yeah, sounds good.

Greg Isenberg [00:01:42]:
So let's start with what you're seeing in terms of hardware, because I don't have a lot of people come on this show and pitch hardware, especially in 2024, when capital is hard to come by, and hardware traditionally is an expensive thing to do. So what's exciting you in hardware, and why do you think there's startup ideas in the space?

Soren Iverson [00:02:07]:
So I think there are kind of orders of magnitude when you consider hardware. I don't know if you would consider books, I. E. What I've been doing by bootstrapping an audience and then selling a product, which is really an entertainment product as hardware. But most people that get big on a social network, they'll make like a knowledge product or an info product, and then it's like 100% margin, right? I think I started making stuff for fun, and then people started asking for a product and so they started asking for a book specifically. So I made that. And the more you order, the cheaper it's going to be. And I think people get really intimidated by the idea of making a physical object.

Soren Iverson [00:02:52]:
But the Internet is pretty amazing and Alibaba I messaged a bunch of different manufacturers. I found a manufacturer that was able to meet my specification requirements, which was like Deboss foil printing hardcover high quality gloss pages, and went through a couple of rounds of sample testing with them and then got a product that I liked. Meanwhile, I took preorders with a payment link. I didn't have a new product right. So I was able to subsidize the initial order cost with the preorders that I got, and then from there I was able to scale it up. So I think even individual people that have an audience and want to do something like that, you can bootstrap that way. I think then you look at AI companies that are going all in on hardware. I think humane rewind tab Rabbit I haven't really used any of these products in person.

Soren Iverson [00:03:49]:
I pre ordered tab, so I'm waiting on getting one of those. I've talked with Avi a couple times. I think the thing that I respect and find exciting about all the players in the space is that there's a general sentiment that the form factor that we interact with on a daily basis, I. E. Phones, is great, but maybe it isn't the thing that will kind of be the container for the next step in software. And so people are really experimenting like a pendant on a necklace, something that pins your clothing little, almost like Game Boy looking mean rabbit. I don't remember what the exact post was, but it compared Apple's initial order numbers with the order numbers that rabbit is seeing. And Rabbit's seeing a huge number of orders for their first round.

Soren Iverson [00:04:42]:
And I know they're ramping up production to try to keep up with that. So I think there's capital intensive ways like that where you're a funded startup with a lot of proprietary software, and then you're building hardware as a complementary form factor. But then there's the initial path that I mentioned, which is like an individual creator that's working on something. Maybe it's a book, maybe it's something like I can't remember the designer's name. They make a lot of office supplies and productivity tools and planners and stuff like that. If you can make a render of it, or if you can pay someone a small amount of money to make a render for it, there are people either overseas or in the United States that you can almost always find to make the thing in your head real, which is really crazy to me. And I kind of wish more people were aware of that and kind of took the steps to make things in their head a reality. Because even if some of these AI tools or other projects people take on end up being, if they don't become massive successes, there's still a lot of learnings and insight and even joy.

Soren Iverson [00:05:50]:
And in the long term nostalgia that comes along with those, I look at Sega Dreamcast, for example. That was the first 3d gaming system that had an open world rpg sonic adventure, which is like a game I grew up on. And they ultimately didn't get the market share that Xbox or PS one has. But you see that logo and you feel something deeply. And a lot of that was because Sega was willing to take a huge swing on a new platform and a new tech, new form factor, new hardware, and I think the ripple of effects of what that even inspires people to make long term, it's hard to understate that.

Greg Isenberg [00:06:37]:
So a buddy of mine created something called Tiny Pod. Have you heard about it?

Soren Iverson [00:06:44]:
I had a conversation with someone last week about Tinypod. Yeah.

Greg Isenberg [00:06:48]:
Okay, so we'll give him a little shout out. So my Budy, he, he led the design engineering team at Snap. So obviously, super smart guy, and he's been always one of those guys. He was like a jailbreak guru. He was always jailbreaking things, like, always, into pushing the limits on devices. And he started something called tinypod. And basically what it does is it transforms the Apple Watch into what almost looks like the original iPhone. So you remember, like the know, circular wheel, I guess, for the, like, he basically picture an Apple Watch, you remove the strap, and he has this case, essentially, that allows you to use it just like that.

Greg Isenberg [00:07:40]:
And at the surface, you're, oh, that's kind of cool. It's a case for the case for the Apple Watch, but I don't really get it. But what he was saying to me was what people are really excited about is the fact that a lot of people are feeling overwhelmed with their phones and they want to leave their phones at home. Some people are getting these dumb phones or flip phones, but for most people, that's not realistic. The beauty about the Apple Watch is you've got your music, you get texts, you get some core things, but you don't have everything. So what he is saying, his bet is it's kind of this perfect middle in the to. So I agree with your premise with like, I don't think noir would do tiny pod five years ago, I think he would have been like, it's too complicated. How am I going to get this made? How am I going to sell this? But now he uses Twitter to get hundreds of likes on his tweets to generate demand.

Greg Isenberg [00:08:51]:
He's probably going to use some fulfillment partner overseas to actually create it. He's going to use probably shopify to power it and all the apps that they have around email marketing and customer service and stuff like that. He's probably going to have a team of customer service overseas. So I think spinning up these ideas are a lot quicker. And so I think you're onto something on this hardware bit, which no one's talking about.

Soren Iverson [00:09:19]:
Yeah. I think the interesting thing too is tiny pod is really interesting to me because it's a callback to the nostalgia of the old ipod. It does attempt to solve the dumb phone problem in a unique way. It's like, I'm not going to buy a light phone, they're really cool, but I have all this stuff that's within Apple's walled garden. Right? And so rather than trying to build something new, you're trying to play ball with and subvert the systems that you have. And I think the idea that you can take an existing device that's extremely popular and turn it into a completely different device. There was another launch a couple of weeks ago that was a case for your phone that has like a BlackBerry keyboard on it. I don't know if you saw that, which is.

Soren Iverson [00:10:11]:
Go ahead.

Greg Isenberg [00:10:12]:
The interesting thing about that is in so many CES articles, CES is supposed to be this. Only the most futuristic stuff is coming out of ces. And every ces list of the top know from CES would be like this quirty keyboard.

Soren Iverson [00:10:30]:
Yeah, I think it's just like with the first people like to, especially younger, like Gen Z, Gen A, there's a really strong demand for hyper personalization of objects that you use a lot. So when widgets came out on iOS, you saw a ton of people going absolutely crazy with custom widget packs, widget apps, just ways to make your phone look like it's your phone and no one else's. I think the idea of TinyPod, and I don't remember the name of the keyboard kind of case, but the idea that you can add an additional layer of customization to a device that you use all the time in order to kind of make it work even better for you is really interesting. And then when you stack skins on top of that. So I know tiny pod and keyboard will be like probably one form factor and a few color skus to start, but with each permutation of that, there are ways that you can make it look and feel like your own. I remember all the phone cases that had modeled after anime characters or whatever, and they have ears on them. Or I think just the idea of customizing ubiquitous hardware to feel like your own is a really high demand for that. And I think the sky is the limit in terms of how you want to be creative and the strategy that you want to use to either change the way people interact with the device, change the way the device looks, or kind of some kind of combination of the two.

Soren Iverson [00:12:11]:
I think there's a lot of interesting potential that people are just starting to tap into, especially, as you said, as it gets easier to test ideas and validate them before sinking in an enormous amount of money into them.

Greg Isenberg [00:12:24]:
So I just pulled up the keyboard company. It's called clicks, which, by the way, perfect name for this clicks for iPhone. It's $139, which honestly, for a case is pretty expensive. I just bought a case for my iPhone. I think it was $40 or $50. So pretty expensive. But it's not just a keyboard I'm looking right now. Well, first of all, it says, make your statement to your point.

Greg Isenberg [00:13:00]:
It's like having a statement by having this says, gain up to 50% more display to immerse yourself in chats, browsing, live streaming. Real keys make typing feel so natural. Scroll through websites. So it's really interesting. I think you're onto something here with these devices have become so ubiquitous, we're looking for ways to make it our own. Nostalgia is coming back. People are willing to pay for it. It's cheaper than ever to create these things.

Greg Isenberg [00:13:31]:
And the truth is they can partner with creators. Someone might be like, well, I don't have. Not like Soren. I don't have hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. Well, it's like, okay, well, maybe you can connect with someone like Soren and maybe you can collab with someone like him. And all you need is like a landing page. A little bit of money, maybe not you in particular. I don't know if you do those things, but a little bit money to work with a creator and you have to be original.

Greg Isenberg [00:14:02]:
Clicks looks like it's really interesting. It looks cool. Tiny pod. Like you go to the website tinypod.com, it gets you excited. That's the other thing. If you're going to create something in hardware, it has to get someone excited. It can't be just like a little bit better.

Soren Iverson [00:14:18]:
Yeah, I think also looking at the clicks, because I pulled up the clicks website while you're talking about it, I think they're actually like opposite ends of the spectrum in a way where Tinypod is kind of solving the pain of like I want to use less of my phone and clicks is like I want to use more of my phone. And it's interesting, right? Because both of those are genuine needs. It's like, okay, you know what, I am realizing that every time I go out to hang out with friends, I'm on my phone 50% of the time. So I'm going to get one of these tiny pods and that way if people need to get a hold of me, they can. But it's pretty easy to get lost in a device this size. But if it's this big, you're not going to want to be hunched over it, right? But then if you are watching a lot of twitch live streams or you want to spend a bunch of time on TikTok, or maybe you write a lot and you actually want a more physical form factor, there is a real utility that both of them provide in different ways. And I think that also speaks to the iPhone is an amazing multipurpose tool that can do just about anything, but it is suboptimal for certain things. Writing, watching video in certain instances, watching video while writing comments, responding to it, things like that.

Soren Iverson [00:15:37]:
And so click specifically identifies the weak point in the hardware and then makes that a selling point of their extension of it. Right, like Apple isn't going to build a keyboard. Well, maybe they will now, but they weren't going to build a keyboard for their phone that had a mean the, that phone is so popular and so many are sold every year that you can build a business on top of.

Greg Isenberg [00:16:02]:
That ecosystem pretty easily and a pretty big business. I wouldn't be surprised if click sells 30,000 units this year. Is there 30,000 people that first of all are nostalgic for this and also want to be faster? Want a physical form factor out in the world? Probably, yeah.

Soren Iverson [00:16:28]:
Especially after the CES coverage, right?

Greg Isenberg [00:16:31]:
Totally. That's the other thing. It's like how do you reverse engineer your product ideas such that they do go viral and they do get covered? A lot of people, and you're the master at this, but a lot of people create a product and then they're like, okay, let me send it to a bunch of journalists. And then they don't get any love, and they don't get anyone writing articles and stuff like that. How do you think about creating a physical product that is going to be shared by thousands?

Soren Iverson [00:17:01]:
Yeah, I think mine is a unique case because I wasn't necessarily creating a product, I was creating memetic content. I think one thing that I've seen a lot of people do when they're working on something is they'll throw the idea out there, and if they don't get immediate validation, they kind of just market as a loss and move on. And the reality of almost anything is it takes a lot of experimentation and a lot of throwing stuff against the wall to figure out what's going to get a response. Right. And I think there's ways you can do that without doing it in a public forum, or you can do that by creating a brand or a separate entity. If you don't want to attribute your name to it, I will say if you're working on something and you don't want to put your name on it from the beginning, you should probably reconsider whether or not you actually want to be working on it, because you should be proud to put your name on stuff you work on. So I think pure cycles and getting feedback and refining is something I think a lot of people don't spend enough time doing. And then I think also, rather than starting with the question of how can I make this thing better, most of my work starts with, why does this suck so bad, and how could I make it suck more? And it sounds like a pointless exercise, but I actually think by exacerbating the pain that people feel, you'll often understand parts of the experience or like patterns that lead to that pain.

Soren Iverson [00:18:36]:
And then you can reverse engineer and kind of do the opposite and make it better. Right? It's actually pretty fun. And I've seen product teams. I had a design manager reach out to me a couple of months ago. He said his product team had taken a couple of hours and they all worked on like, how can we take our product and make it terrible? Way, way worse? And through that, they were able to find, like, you know what, this part of our experience is pretty suboptimal. So I think iteration cycles, not giving up too early, going in the opposite direction to figure out and clarify the direction you want to go into. And then I think also more relevant for most people, which are people that don't have a couple hundred thousand followers across social platforms, is find people that are willing to go to bat with you. For you, the great thing about how ubiquitous like TikTok and micro influencers has become is even five years ago, to do a social campaign, you'd need to probably work with huge names.

Soren Iverson [00:19:41]:
It cost a lot of money, but now some people just do it for a free product sample and then other people will do it for a couple of can work with people that have niche audiences. Right. And that'll actually give you the ability to more analytically test in different audience subtypes. Right. So rather than placing all your chips on one TikTok creator where it could flop, you could try it with five or six. And then I also think even if you don't have the resources to do that, there's nothing stopping you from creating multiple social channels to test. I don't remember what the Ecom company was, but someone was posting about they created dozens of different TikToks accounts for their brand, and they had just ruthlessly tested different brand and product creative until they figured out what hit and then they doubled down on that. Right.

Soren Iverson [00:20:41]:
So I think even if people are running a lot of iterations and cycles, they're doing it within the same platform or channel rather than really being comprehensive and kind of going to all ends of the Internet to figure out. There are a lot of people online, and there are a lot of people online in a lot of different places. And even if you know that a certain cohort is interested in a certain thing, the kind of sub niches of that cohort. And I realized this as my following was growing, it is easier often to find a very small cohort within a large community and go after them, blow up there and then kind of parlay that influence into other spheres of influence that are either directly related or tangentially related. Right. But you don't learn that unless you have experiment with a lot of different things.

Greg Isenberg [00:21:34]:
What's an example of that happening?

Soren Iverson [00:21:38]:
Yeah, so I post these interfaces every day. If I post something that is a satirical concept for Instagram, pretty much anyone will understand it, because everyone uses Instagram or knows someone's used Instagram. But I did a concept that was pager duty, and it was a pager duty feature where if you didn't respond to your on call ticket, it would call your girlfriend. And Pager Duty is an app that really only developers and engineers, primarily people that work at large technology companies, would know. Right. So in posting that, I got a lot more comments, likes, responses, follows, and dms from people that worked within that community. I also saw, I don't remember their name, but there's an account that does something similar to what I do, but they only do it for Rocket League and it blew up. Right.

Soren Iverson [00:22:39]:
So I think what I learned from that is if I want to go after a specific niche or if I want to tailor my content to people, go to where they are, I, e, find the apps that they would likely be using, and then you're kind of like throwing them a bone comedically. It's like, okay, I know this joke isn't going to hit with a lot of people, but I know it will really hit with this audience. But then there are other creators that realize like, oh, he can do this. Then I can really go after this one niche, this rocky league thing.

Greg Isenberg [00:23:11]:
Yeah, that's great. And I think you touch on an important point, which is comedy and content. And a lot of people listening to this are all like, how do I get my first 10,000 followers? How do I get my first 100,000 followers? And I think what's interesting about your content is you infuse laughs in it and you reverse engineer the laugh and you can do that with the product, meaning you can create clicks and maybe that's funny or maybe tiny pod is funny or shareable, and you can also do that with content. So how do you recommend to people who are listening, how do you recommend that they structure their, well, firstly, should they structure their content with comedy? And then two, how do you do it?

Soren Iverson [00:23:59]:
Yeah, I think it depends on context. Right? Like, read the room. If you're building medical technology company that helps people understand their blood oxygen sat levels, you probably don't want to be making satirical concepts that just know the space. And so if the space that you're working in is really serious or very heavily regulated, you probably want to stay out of being too funny. I think if you're doing something more consumer focused or something that is a bit more lax, which is a lot of things, there's the form factor of the comedy and then there's the type of comedy. So those are two kind of discrete things. I think I still, even today, I'm still kind of, like, finding my comedic voice. I experiment with a lot of stuff.

Soren Iverson [00:24:50]:
I know generally what's on brand and off brand in terms of, I think of myself as like a comedy show that's like pg that skews to pg 13. Sometimes people could take their kids to a comedy show that I did on the Internet, and it's fine, right. I'm not going to be making anything that's rated r, and I'm also not going to make stuff that's Pixar level, accessible for anyone. So I almost think about, when you're doing comedy, thinking about, if you were a movie, what would you be rated? Or if you were a song, would you be explicit or not? That's an interesting framework because it immediately takes a lot of stuff off the table or puts a lot stuff on the table. And then I think generally, most of my work starts with a real world circumstance or situation, and then identifying if and how that interacts or intersects with the technology that we use and then constructing the joke around that. So, for example, last summer, we were flying back from a trip and we were super late, and we were running to catch our next flight, and this person shoved their way through us and sprinted. It was very aggressive. I was like, okay, I get it.

Soren Iverson [00:26:05]:
We're going to make the flight, though, so don't have to be crazy about it. And then in my head, I'm like, oh, I'd fight this person if I had to. There's like a passing thought, like an intrusive thought. And I think most people dismiss their intrusive thoughts, but I'm like, wait a minute. There's, like an idea in there somewhere. And it's like, okay, what if when united overbooks your flights, you had to physically fight the person for a seat, right? And then that became an insane concept that people were like, what is wrong with you? How did you come up with this? I think part of it is just living and observing life and then zooming in on points of friction. It's been interesting because philosophically, that helps me just deal with stuff more because I'm like, anything that is weird or wild, that happens. It's like something that you could potentially create a bit out of.

Soren Iverson [00:26:56]:
But I think once you start looking through things with that lens, it's kind of something that is hard to turn off. So I think there's that piece, and then I think there's the form factor. So there's people like Nick Huber or like, alex Cohen where most of their comedy is, like, text based, right? So I think Alex Cohen and maybe someone else created it, but there's the meme of a company does layoffs or launches some crazy product feature, and then he's like, I just got laid off. I was the PM that was responsible for, and it's like, whatever, horrible feature. And so there's text bits that you can make and I think anyone can write, right? So I think not the lowest form of comedy, but the easiest and most accessible way is taking existing frameworks. And then iterating on them. So if you see a format that is popular, you can jump on that bandwagon. Right.

Soren Iverson [00:27:57]:
Another one is current events. Anyone can see a current event, then capitalize on it. So I did a campaign with Duolingo where I was just making concepts and serendipitously, we had just approved for posting the duolingo option to serve and translate divorce papers. And then the day after that, Trudeau separated with his partner and so Duolingo posted it and it blew up. Right. So I think reading the room in terms of just the sentiment of all of social, then world events is another way. Trying to think what else. Yeah, I think those are the two good entry points.

Soren Iverson [00:28:37]:
It's just like a good sense of current events and then also identifying trends and then capitalizing and iterating on them. You see a lot of people that will just yoink people's stuff and post it. I think that's like a really low move. And also, if you're doing that as a brand, it's going to erode a lot of trust. And then I think one other thing, and this is more with brands that are established, but I think it is an interesting thing to call out. So Duolingo is known for having an unhinged brand. I think all of us owe a great debt to Wendy's because Wendy's was the first company to be self aware on the Internet and really kind of go after people shout out Wendy. Shout out Wendy the OG.

Soren Iverson [00:29:23]:
And then recently, someone put me on to Ryanair. Their Instagram and TikTok feed is like the wildest thing I've ever seen. Because people know that if anyone's ever flown Ryanair, it's the worst. It's so cheap, the seats are uncomfortable, their flights are always late. It's just the worst. But instead of them trying to apologize or compensate for that, they take the knife and twist it. So there's like a reel where it's like, how to sit, and then first it shows a person with no legroom, and then it shows, like, Benji, a dog learn to sit, and then it's like this other person, whoever learned to sit, and then it's like, you can too. And it's just ruthlessly mocking their customer base, which you would think for a lot of brands wouldn't be able to do that.

Soren Iverson [00:30:17]:
But I think Ryan area is in a really unique position where they've identified, like, here's a sentiment that we have about our brand, and rather than shying away from it, even though it's negative, we're doubling down on it because, and the interesting thing is, people in the comments were actually in certain instances defending Ryanair because flights used to be so expensive that they couldn't fly. And even though Ryanair has a crappy product, it's a cheap product, right? So in a way they're hyper aware of their unique selling point. And even though there's a lot of problems that come as a side effect of their unique selling point, rather than trying to shy away from those or protect themselves, they're owning it. So yeah, that was a bit of an all over the place answer, but I think it's a pretty nuanced conversation about how to do comedy depending on what you're doing.

Greg Isenberg [00:31:08]:
It's what I wanted, honestly, it was exactly what I wanted. I wanted it to crawl around your brain to see how you think about creating content. So that was helpful. I want to move on to for real estate pros because I didn't really expect you to have a real estate idea. Talk to me about that idea.

Soren Iverson [00:31:31]:
It's interesting, right? Because people are going to tune into this podcast and be like, what am I listening to? So we don't need to spend too much time on this if we don't want to. But like every other person that had a little bit of money to invest in the they were real estate investors. I've done a little bit primarily in single family rentals, but then last year, and I haven't really posted about this, but I dipped my toes into the Airbnb market with the first property and I think their Airbnb generally has a great platform for guests. Obviously they have a good general platform for hosts. And then companies like local prop management companies and then companies like Vicasa are kind of going after the idea of turnkey management. And then you also have a data aggregator platform like Airdna, which is trying to kind of pull higher level insights for people to make market level decisions on what's up and coming, what's slowing down, and just general sentiment analysis. I do think something that going through the process has been painful for myself is like tax optimization and hyper local services that are really comprehensive in helping you understand the financial picture and then walking you through that and digitizing a lot of it. I think part of that is just the nuance of working locale to locale.

Soren Iverson [00:33:09]:
But I do think right now we're seeing this trend mean. I think Nick Huber is an example of this. And there's other people like that where they talk about boring businesses, which is more generally something super low level. Like, anyone can grab a lawnmower and start mowing lawns. But I think if you start to digitize that or any other kind of manual business like that, it becomes a lot more appealing to kind of the next generation of people. Like, if I needed to get plumbing work done, we ended up working with the plumber that we work with because they primarily communicate via text and have a really good digital experience. Right? Like, a lot of people just don't have that. And so I think with some of the intricacies of prop management, specifically as it comes to Airbnb and navigating the local stuff.

Soren Iverson [00:33:58]:
So everything from like pest control to landscaping to taxes, all of those are like, disparate pieces. And often components of that are still very manual or physical, or if not, they're actually not all bundled into one full package. So I think people that really could roll up multiple kind of boring businesses stacked on top of each other and then brand it into one service with a really smooth digital experience. I think just generally anything in the real estate space, there are a lot of people competing in terms of providing a good customer experience. But the idea of a good user experience is still something that is pretty suboptimal. And so I think it's like a longer term play and you'd obviously need a little bit more capital. But even starting with one component of that process and then perfecting it, I think you could either go broad, right? Like you could specialize in one component of that and then go across an entire market, or you could really go hyper local and try to dominate one specific market by stacking all the services on top of each other and providing a best in class experience. I think there are these larger Airbnb prop management companies that are trying to go nationwide, and the reality is they don't understand the intricacies of the local market.

Soren Iverson [00:35:19]:
And from what I've seen in a lot of local markets is that they have one or two very entrenched players that handle most people if they do it all. And so I think it's just an area that's still ripe for a lot of competition.

Greg Isenberg [00:35:36]:
Yeah. So we often forget real estate is like a multi trillion dollar asset class, and the way we interact with it is still so archaic. And it's crazy because people have been actually, I've heard people say that exact same line, like ten years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, now, but it still kind of sucks to find a plumber or manage your Airbnb or what have you. I have someone who manages my vacation home in Quebec, in the mountains, and the guy doesn't text a, b. He doesn't speak one word of English. One word. Thankfully, I speak some French, but I prefer to just be waiting in line for a coffee and just texting in English versus calling him up. Doesn't have his cell phone.

Greg Isenberg [00:36:37]:
I have to call his homeline. It's like crazy, right? So I think what you're saying is the experience needs to be digitized, but it also needs the nuances of what Gen Z and millennials expect from a product, because these are people who grew up on Instagram, people who grew up on TikTok. So the products that they're used to need to have some of that jazz.

Soren Iverson [00:37:03]:
I think there's a couple of components, too. I think part of it is also education, so you can learn pretty much anything you need to. But a lot of that knowledge is still going onto a government website and then reading an faq or downloading a giant pdf and reading that. And there's a lot of people that go after the same content types. There's a million people making content about how to make a cool dashboard design in Figma. But the level of intent and production around more of the nuances of like, okay, if you are filing taxes for an Airbnb, here's what they're taking away out of the app transaction and breaking that down like you're a five year old, right? I think part of it is seasoned people are going to figure that out, and they're going to go through a couple of reps to learn all of those things. But I still do think that just generally, education curriculum around more historically complex areas is something that there's still opportunity for people to invest time and resources into. And then I also think that even in the last couple of years, tech has progressed so much, so fast that the example of the person that manages your company or your house, even if they're not, let's just imagine a world where they do text, or someone else that has someone that they do text, but they're texting in a different language.

Soren Iverson [00:38:34]:
Real time transcription of language from one to another is something that is basically doable now. And so the idea of, oh, I used to have all these service people that didn't speak English, and coordinating efforts with them was really difficult. Now it really is one language. You can put whatever input you need to in English, it'll be spat out in French and vice versa. So I think those changes have really only come about within the last couple of years. And so taking all of those things and then packaging them into an experience, I think it's like anything, you're just going to need to kind of continue to run cycles and improvements upon it. And I think ten or 15 years ago, manual businesses and doing anything real estate was really rough. And I think there has been a lot of progress, but there's always progress to be made.

Greg Isenberg [00:39:22]:
Yeah. And I think the way you figure out where the progress to be made is, you actually go and do the thing. So you become a property owner, and as you become a property owner and you rent it out, you look at all the different products that you're using to facilitate it and all the different pain points you have and just write out all the pain points. The big idea of becoming a property owner isn't necessarily the real estate, in my opinion. It's figuring out all the different pain points in the real estate process, the different products that need to be made, and then figuring out how can I make this a user experience so that it's so seamless and it's going to make the existing product feel so antiquated? And then you go and spin something up.

Soren Iverson [00:40:13]:
Yeah, I think part of it is by either feeling that pain yourself and then documenting it, or likely a lot of people are like, I can't just go start buying up properties. Right. I think if you do want to get started in that space specifically, I think there's something to be said for working in the space, like working for a prop management company. And if that's even too high lift or high commitment, I think there are a million different message boards and forums you can look at across the Internet where you'll see people experiencing any number of frustrations or complications. There's the idea of Reddit unbundling.

Greg Isenberg [00:40:57]:
Right.

Soren Iverson [00:40:57]:
The whole products have been spun up by people picking apart Reddit threads or talking to people about the space and gaining a deep level of understanding about the space by surrounding yourself with people and learning from those people. So I think even if you don't want to kind of put yourself in the driver's seat of having all the responsibility of owning a thing and then managing that thing and then figuring out all of the pain points surrounding that thing and then going from there, there are ways to move in that direction and expose yourself to that space without the risk and upfront investment that that would typically require.

Greg Isenberg [00:41:34]:
Totally, like the minimal viable product for building something in the space isn't going raising money or taking your own money to go buy a property. It's teleport yourself onto places like Reddit, onto Twitter, onto Facebook groups. Learn as much as you can through that, through the problems, but then surround yourself with a group of people who have been in the driver's seat, because you need someone in the driver's seat to really understand the nuances so that you can incorporate it into the product. So I totally agree with you. Most startups could launch for under $100 and are just a waitlist and a landing page to get some interest. So I think in real estate, too, I don't think that's the case. I don't want to leave this conversation without the third sort of set of business ideas, which is business ideas, startup ideas. In the design space, you spend a lot of time with design tools.

Greg Isenberg [00:42:33]:
You have a deep relationship with the design community, as in a lot of designers follow you and interact with you. So where do you see the opportunity in terms of building startups, businesses for platforms. Design platforms, but also for the design community?

Soren Iverson [00:42:52]:
Yeah. So I think I'll tackle this in two things. First, I'll start with like, I'm a designer and I want to start a business. What should I do? And then I'll do like, I'm a founder wanting to serve the design space. What do I do? Individual designers, you can kind of go any route, I think, as a freelancer, and I know this because I lived it. Anyone that wants to start freelancing, you start from nothing, unless you were born into a long line of respected designers, which isn't a thing with product design, but you start and you have no leverage. So I took on my first job. It was like, I probably worked like a couple of days, literally like 48 plus hours, like learning after effects and all this stuff.

Soren Iverson [00:43:38]:
And it was a project in high school that I did for a friend, and I made like $25 and got into a concert for free because it was like a lyric video for a band. But at the end of that, I had a project and I had social proof or like a testimonial from that person that I'd worked with. And I was able to use that to command a slightly higher rate. And then I did that over and over and over and over and over again for a decade. And throughout that I'd identified, I want to do this type of work. I don't want to do this type of work. So for people that are like, I want to start freelancing, but I want to increase my rate. How do I do that? The answer really is, you do a lot of work, you build trust with a lot of people and you get referrals and then you put in the effort for a really long time.

Soren Iverson [00:44:23]:
I think if you want to build a business, I was having this conversation with a friend yesterday. There's creative resourcing or creative resources and tools, which I think is a really difficult, uphill battle to fight. But you can make icon packs, you can make illustration packs, you can make website templates, you can make app templates. I think the reality is people are looking for custom bespoke stuff. Yes, a lot of people will pay for site templates. I know there's a guy on Twitter that he makes site templates on framer and is doing really well for himself. And then there's craft work or envato. There's like these aggregators.

Soren Iverson [00:44:59]:
I think trying to go at it as an individual is really tough because you're fighting against the distribution that these huge platforms have. That's where if you are really good at icon illustration, for example, going out as an independent designer and doing that's Bonnie Kate Wolfe, like she did icons for Discord, for Netflix, really specializing, there is a small client base for that. But if you want to be like, oh, I just make icons and they're kind of generic, you're going to be fighting against an aggregator. And that's really tough. There's knowledge products like Bret from design. Joy has a course about making an agency. I think the hard thing there is you usually have to do something that creates a lot of social proof before you can build and sell a course. Same with educational products.

Soren Iverson [00:45:47]:
You have to have a lot of experience. So I think for a lot of designers, a lot of designers want to have a cash flowing business right out the gate. And I think realistically, I would encourage people to become really strong designers before they do that. And then by doing a bunch of different design work, you also figure out what you like and what you're good at, and then you can lean into those things more. And when you do decide that you want to make a business around those, you'll often have more skill and you'll be able to execute faster at a higher level of quality rather than spinning your wheels on trying to create a business when you haven't developed a high enough level of expertise on the startup side, there's like the tooling that people use every day, right? So it was Photoshop, then it was sketch, and then for a hot second it was envision, and then Figma came up and ate Envision's lunch, for lack of a better way of saying it. And then Figma is really the dominant player in terms of collaborative product design and web design tooling. I think Adobe still has its place in the world. I still use Adobe products.

Soren Iverson [00:47:03]:
I think especially with the AI advancements that they've made. My wife was working on, she designs stuff as well. She's more on the marketing side, but she was designing something yesterday and I showed her the quick select and then you can generate a prompt like change someone's jewelry that used to take a compositor hours. Right. And so I think Figma and Adobe will have kind of both their respective places. I think they're both enormous companies and they're both set to do really well in the coming years. I think in terms of where things are going, I don't have a crystal ball where I know what's going to happen. I think there's interesting trends.

Soren Iverson [00:47:47]:
So it used to be that designers became so designers in agencies became UX designers or UI designers and then slowly over the title converged into product designer. And now we're seeing this world where front end engineering or researchers or product managers, one of those kind of components are fusing with product designer. So like design technologist or design engineer is a popular term where it's a designer that can design things but that can also prototype them. So I think the disciplines are going to collapse more economy, capitalist society, things are efficient and so it's going to find the most efficient way to get things done, which is often like a hybrid PM designer or a hybrid designer marketer, or a hybrid designer engineer. So I think the question becomes who's building the tooling for a designer and a marketer? Arguably it's canva who's building the tool for a PM designer? I think that's a really interesting question because there's a lot of data and insights and research aggregation. I actually have a friend, so shout out Treg. He's working on a startup called Divinate, which is like an AI based research tool for designers and product managers and then things like Swiftui versel. There's a lot of replic, there's a lot of companies working on design engineering tools in terms of how to or what to build in that space.

Soren Iverson [00:49:22]:
I think there's also a lot of really interesting stuff happening in the gen AI space. Like Photoshop has so much baggage from 20 years of being a photo editing and compositing tool that I don't remember what the tool was called, but there was like a recent design tool that came out that was a really interesting way to generate assets quickly edit and improve them and cycle through iterations. And so I think that space is still very early. And I think we're at the point, similar to what I talked about with AI hardware, where a lot of people are throwing a lot of stuff at the wall in terms of gen AI. And I think we're still trying to figure out how to correctly augment and connect to the current designer's workflow. Right. Because figma was a step better than envision and so it was a natural thing for the whole industry to shift. I think the needs of the industry now are there are more fragmented needs and so I'm guessing niche products will pop up around the design, marketing, design, engineering, design and product use cases and then also just gen AI on top of that.

Soren Iverson [00:50:41]:
I think it's probably more helpful for me to give that summary of the space as someone that is in the space, rather than me telling every person listening to this, to build a gen AI startup. And I think I have a better sense of how the individual designer should do it rather than like, oh, I'm a tech founder and I'm trying to figure out what to build.

Greg Isenberg [00:50:58]:
I also think that whenever there's a new role that's created design engineer, there's an opportunity to build content community, paid community around it. So for example, Lenny Richitsky, many people know him, multi million dollar year business servicing product managers. But who's going to be the Lenny Richitsky for product?

Soren Iverson [00:51:23]:
Yeah, yeah, I think that's right.

Greg Isenberg [00:51:25]:
Because there's design, sorry.

Soren Iverson [00:51:27]:
Yeah, well, there's like a lot of design content and there's a lot of how to code content, but it's like designers coding, there's less there. So I think you're right. People starting to meld those and build community and content around those is a huge opportunity.

Greg Isenberg [00:51:44]:
Yeah, I also think digital assets, you mentioned that in the beginning around templates and stuff like that for platforms is one of those things that there's always opportunity to create those things. But you are right, the platforms make it harder to unless you have a big audience to sell. But I still believe that there's tremendous opportunity still in those spaces. And I think the way to think about it is maybe don't create a WordPress theme because people have been creating WordPress themes for 20 years and it's probably saturated at this point. What's something new? So you've talked a lot about framer in the past. That ecosystem is growing very quickly. Webflow. That ecosystem is growing very quickly.

Greg Isenberg [00:52:33]:
How do you create stuff for them.

Soren Iverson [00:52:35]:
Yeah, I think that's right. And I even think design Xcode is one of the first people to really package design and coding tutorials as, like, one thing. But I still think there's a lot of space where it's like, there's not really a place that I know, like, oh, as a designer, you should go to this place to get this kind of custom component for Xcode that's like, oh, you're building this app and you need a custom nav bar. Like, here, start with this thing, right? Maybe you pay $5 for all this boilerplate swift Ui. That looks really nice and is like a level better than a lot of the out of the box components. But I think, like you said, it's like people are just now, there's just now a level of critical mass of interest there. So I don't think people have started to invest in the content community around that opportunity.

Greg Isenberg [00:53:22]:
That's why people listen to know. Ding, ding, ding. All right, Soren Iverson, it's been real. Thanks for coming on the show. You are the Larry David of design Twitter in a good way.

Soren Iverson [00:53:38]:
And if you don't end this episode with the curb your enthusiasm theme song, missed opportunity, if you don't, sore, where.

Greg Isenberg [00:53:45]:
Could folks find out about you? And I think you have a new book coming out, too, so maybe you can plug that as.

Soren Iverson [00:53:52]:
So, I mean, you can find me basically wherever you are on the Internet, x, Twitter, whatever you want to call it, threads, LinkedIn, Instagram, sometimes TikTok. I still don't know how to use TikTok, so bear with me. And then, yeah, I'm working on a book, so as we speak, I have the preorders for the second version up. Like, if you go on any of my social links, you'll be able to find that and pre order it. And then those should start shipping either late February or early March.

Greg Isenberg [00:54:27]:
Amazing. I love it. I'll keep following. I'll grab the book. I subscribe to you on Twitter and the email as well. Daily ideas. It gets me going as someone who, I mean, I'm in the business of creating new concepts through one of our businesses, which is called LCA, and it's an innovation agency. So we work with a lot of the companies that you mock up stuff, and that's originally how I actually heard about you.

Soren Iverson [00:54:56]:
Oh, really?

Greg Isenberg [00:54:57]:
Yeah. One of the big companies that we do innovation, product design work, so we invent the future. Some of the biggest companies in the world, and one of them, I was in their slack. They invited us into our slack, and they sent something that you did. And I was like, who's this guy? And I've been hooked ever since.

Soren Iverson [00:55:21]:
Wild.

Greg Isenberg [00:55:22]:
Yeah. So thank you very much. I'll catch you later, man.

Soren Iverson [00:55:26]:
Thanks for having me. Bye.