The Startup Ideas Podcast

I sit down with Jonathan Courtney, host of Unscheduled CEO Podcast, to talk about the gap between building AI-powered products and actually making money from them. Jonathan walks through his four-step "Promoter Blueprint" — traffic, holding pattern, selling event, and conversion — and shows exactly how he uses Claude and Claude Code to execute each phase. This one is a wake-up call for any founder spending more time optimizing automations than promoting what they sell.

Timestamps

00:00 – Intro and Welcome Back

04:13 – The Founder’s Real Job: Promotion, Period

09:23 – The Promoter Blueprint (Screen Share)

19:38 – Using AI with Promoter Blueprint

22:52 – Inside Claude: Jonathan's Claude Workflow

28:41 – Moving from Claude to Claude Code for Builds

30:55 – Building a $450K Webinar Campaign with Claude

37:30 – Scale Up, Abundance Over Efficiency

43:57 – Final Advice: Embrace Your Role as Promoter

Key Points

A CEO's primary job is promoting the business — building is secondary to getting people in the door.

AI tools become "procrastination machines" when builders optimize systems that have zero customers.

Every revenue engine follows four phases: traffic, holding pattern, selling event, conversion (and a loop back).

Claude projects combined with Claude Code create a fast workflow for going from research to a shipped marketing asset in under an hour.

The current play is abundance and scale, using AI to run five campaigns instead of one, rather than cutting headcount for efficiency.

Off-the-shelf solutions still beat custom builds in many cases — always ask before you spend three days vibe-coding something.

The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com

LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/

The Vibe Marketer - Resources for people into vibe marketing/marketing with AI: https://www.thevibemarketer.com/

FIND ME ON SOCIAL

X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg

Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/

FIND JONATHAN ON SOCIAL

Unscheduled CEO Podcast: https://www.unscheduledceo.com/

X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jicecream

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-courtney-4510644b/

I sit down with James Dickerson, a growth marketer, Claude Code power user, and the mind behind The Boring Marketer, to watch him build an entire marketing system live from the terminal. James walks me through his full workflow: deep research with the Perplexity MCP, positioning angle discovery, direct response copywriting, landing page creation, lead magnet design, ad creative generation with Remotion, and traffic strategy — all inside Claude Code using stacked skills and MCPs. By the end, we have a conversion-ready funnel for a fictional AI marketing agency serving boring local businesses, and James shares the free playbook he created from a two-hour recorded session so listeners can replicate the process themselves.

Timestamps

00:00 – Intro and Camera Setup Chat

02:57 – Episode Preview: Building a Vibe Marketing System

06:33 – Perplexity MCP for Market Research

08:13 – Live Demo: Researching an AI Marketing Agency Niche

09:48 – Positioning Angles Skill

11:34 – Direct Response Copywriting Skill

15:43 – Playwright MCP for Competitive Intelligence

17:37 – Keeping Your MCP Stack Simple (Perplexity, Firecrawl, Playwright)

20:59 – Anthropic's Front End Design Skill

25:51 – Remotion: Creating Video Ads from the Terminal

28:47 – Landing Page Review: "Boring Money" Agency

30:43 – Orchestrator Skill: Deciding What to Do Next

34:10 – Lead Magnet Skill

34:10 – Are Skills Underrated

39:08 – Claude Code Costs: $200/Month Max Subscription

42:03 – Live Lead Magnet Review

43:28 – Keyword Research and Traffic Strategy Skills

45:23 – The Evolution of Vibe Marketing

47:11 – Remotion Setup and Ad Creation Demo

54:47 – Final Ad and SEO Page Review

57:25 – Final Thoughts

Links Mentioned:

Vibe Marketing Playbook: https://startup-ideas-pod.link/vibe_marketing_playbook

Vibe Marketing Skills: https://startup-ideas-pod.link/Vibe_marketing_skills

Key Points

Spending an hour on upfront research with the Perplexity MCP produces dramatically better marketing outputs than jumping straight into prompting.

Skills are instruction manuals for your AI agent — the expert perspective you build into them (the last 10–20%) is what separates great output from generic AI slop.

You can build a complete marketing funnel — landing page, lead magnet, ad creative, SEO content, and traffic strategy — in a single Claude Code session.

Remotion lets you create programmatic video ads directly from the terminal at zero cost, in multiple formats, with custom branding.

An orchestrator skill can guide you through what to do next, removing the "I have a landing page, now what?" paralysis.

The same Claude Code environment where you build products can also ship your entire marketing system — research, copy, design, and deployment in one place.

The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com

LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/

The Vibe Marketer - Resources for people into vibe marketing/marketing with AI: https://www.thevibemarketer.com/

FIND ME ON SOCIAL

X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg

Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/

FIND JAMES ON SOCIAL

X/Twitter: https://x.com/boringmarketer 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jadickerson/

I sit down with Morgan Linton, Cofounder/CTO of Bold Metrics, to break down the same-day release of Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.3 Codex. We walk through exactly how to set up Opus 4.6 in Claude Code, explore the philosophical split between autonomous agent teams and interactive pair-programming, and then put both models to the test by having each one build a Polymarket competitor from scratch, live and unscripted. By the end, you'll know how to configure each model, when to reach for one over the other, and what happened when we let them race head-to-head.

Timestamps

00:00 – Intro

03:26 – Setting Up Opus 4.6 in Claude Code

05:16 – Enabling Agent Teams

08:32 – The Philosophical Divergence between Codex and Opus

11:11 – Core Feature Comparison (Context Window, Benchmarks, Agentic Behavior)

15:27 – Live Demo Setup: Polymarket Build Prompt Design

18:26 – Race Begins

21:02 – Best Model for Vibe Coders

22:12 – Codex Finishes in Under 4 Minutes

26:38 – Opus Agents Still Running, Token Usage Climbing

31:41 – Testing and Reviewing the Codex Build

40:25 – Opus Build Completes, First Look at Results

42:47 – Opus Final Build Reveal

44:22 – Side-by-Side Comparison: Opus Takes This Round

45:40 – Final Takeaways and Recommendations

Key Points

Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.3 Codex dropped within 18 minutes of each other and represent two fundamentally different engineering philosophies — autonomous agents vs. interactive collaboration.

To use Opus 4.6 properly, you must update Claude Code to version 2.1.32+, set the model in settings.json, and explicitly enable the experimental Agent Teams feature.

Opus 4.6's standout feature is multi-agent orchestration: you can spin up parallel agents for research, architecture, UX, and testing — all working simultaneously.

GPT-5.3 Codex's standout feature is mid-task steering: you can interrupt, redirect, and course-correct the model while it's actively building.

In the live head-to-head, Codex finished a Polymarket competitor in under 4 minutes; Opus took significantly longer but produced a more polished UI, richer feature set, and 96 tests vs. Codex's 10.

Agent teams multiply token usage substantially — a single Opus build can consume 150,000–250,000 tokens across all agents.

The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com

LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/

The Vibe Marketer - Resources for people into vibe marketing/marketing with AI: https://www.thevibemarketer.com/

FIND ME ON SOCIAL

X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg

Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/

Morgan Linton

X/Twitter: https://x.com/morganlinton

Bold Metrics: https://boldmetrics.com

Personal Website: https://linton.ai

I sit down with Matt Van Horn, creator of the "Last 30 Days" skill for Claude Code, as he demonstrates how this tool turns anyone into a real-time research expert. By pulling trending data from X, Reddit, and the web, Last 30 Days supercharges Claude Code prompts with current intelligence. Matt walks through live demos, from discovering popular rap songs to generating cold emails to building a Moltbot competitor, showing how non-engineers can ship products using AI tools with almost no coding background.

Timestamps

00:00 – Intro

01:39 – What Is "Last 30 Days"

03:29 – Live Demo: Most Popular Rap Songs

04:47 – Cold Email Frameworks Demo

07:04 – Growing an X Following Using Recent Data

07:49 – Researching Moltbot to Build a Competitor

08:26 – Best Practices for Last 30 days

09:26 – Growing an X Following Using Recent Data Results

11:17 – Best Practices for Webdesign Research

13:44 – Building an Enterprise Moltbot Clone Live

17:43 – Generating Figma Prompts and Nano Banana Images

21:54 – Advice for Non-Engineers Getting Started with Claude Code

Links Mentioned:

Last 30 Days Skill: https://startup-ideas-pod.link/last30days

Key Points

Last 30 Days searches X, Reddit, and the web for content from the past month, creating highly optimized prompts for Claude Code.

The tool requires Claude Code access, an OpenAI API key (for Reddit data), and an XAI key (for X/Twitter access).

Matt demonstrates using minimal prompts to generate cold email frameworks, research trending topics, and kickstart new product builds.

Compound Engineering serves as a planning tool to turn research into structured project roadmaps.

Non-engineers can ship functional products by combining Claude Code with ChatGPT for troubleshooting errors via screenshots.

The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com

LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/

The Vibe Marketer - Resources for people into vibe marketing/marketing with AI: https://www.thevibemarketer.com/

FIND ME ON SOCIAL

X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg

Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/

Matt Van Horn

X/Twitter: https://x.com/mvanhorn

I sit down with Kevin Rose for a live screen share where he walks me through “Nylon,” a personal Techmeme-style news engine he vibe-coded to track AI and tech stories. He breaks down how he pulls from RSS, enriches articles with tools like iFramely, Firecrawl, and Gemini, then generates TLDRs and vector embeddings to cluster stories with real nuance. We dig into his “gravity engine,” an editorial scoring system that ranks stories by impact, novelty, and builder relevance. The bigger theme is simple: with today’s models and workflows, a solo builder can ship wild, high-leverage software fast, then refine by cutting features down to the few that matter.

Timestamps:

00:00 – Intro And What Kevin Plans To Demo

03:10 – Techmeme Breakdown And How Signal Gets Ranked

06:44 – RSS Sources, Ingestion, And The Article Pipeline

11:23 – Winner Selection: RSS vs iFramely vs Firecrawl vs Gemini

13:01 – Why iFramely And Firecrawl, Explained

16:37 – TLDRs, Vector Embeddings, And Why They Beat Keyword Search

19:49 – Task Orchestration With trigger.dev And Retries

24:58 – Clusters: Expanding With Search APIs And Discovery

27:07 – The Gravity Engine: Editorial Scoring Rubric

31:31 – Product Management: Gut, Iteration, And Cutting Features

34:53 – Synthetic Audiences And Personal Software

37:03 – What “Success” Looks Like

43:52 – Retention Mechanics And The Idea Browser Example

47:19 – “Blurred Presence” Blog Project From A 12-Year-Old Idea

50:34 – This the best time to build

51:55 – How To Work With Kevin, DIGG Reboot, And VC Today

Keypoints

I watch Kevin’s end-to-end pipeline for turning messy RSS links into clean, enriched, clustered stories.

Kevin uses a “winner” judge to pick the best source of truth per field (summary, main content, metadata).

Vector embeddings plus clustering unlock meaning-level grouping that keyword search misses.

trigger.dev gives durable background jobs, retries, and observability for a solo builder workflow.

His “gravity engine” acts like an editorial layer that prioritizes novelty, impact, and builder relevance.

The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com

LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/

The Vibe Marketer - Resources for people into vibe marketing/marketing with AI: https://www.thevibemarketer.com/

FIND ME ON SOCIAL

X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg

Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/

Kevin Rose: x: https://x.com/kevinrose

personal website: https://www.kevinrose.com/about

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@KevinRose