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The Startup Ideas Podcast

The 2026 Anti-Trend That Will Make Millions

20 Oct 2025

Transcription

Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?

0.031 - 5.302 Greg Isenberg

One of the most common questions I get is, how would you make a million dollars if you were starting from scratch?

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Chapter 2: What is the anti-trend to AI that businesses should consider?

5.723 - 25.601 Greg Isenberg

I'd either create a AI startup, a GPT wrapper, build an audience, sell to that audience, or I do what Jonathan Courtney said in this episode. In this episode, he talks about the anti-trends. I think that there's a tremendous... opportunity right now to go actually against AI and do just a lot of IRL stuff.

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Chapter 3: Why are in-person events becoming more valuable?

26.062 - 39.664 Greg Isenberg

He talks about how he rented a Italian village, how he got customers via DMs to fund it, how you don't need an audience to do this. He explains the entire playbook. I hope a lot of people listen to this episode.

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Chapter 4: What frameworks can help in creating successful in-person events?

41.307 - 66.285 Greg Isenberg

I It's not as hypey as the latest AI tool, but for the people who stick around to the end, I think that they're going to have an unfair advantage for building a million dollar business in 2026. Enjoy the episode. Jonathan Courtney, by the end of this episode, what are we going to learn?

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66.755 - 76.104 Jonathan Courtney

What we are going to learn is how to use the anti-trend of all of this AI explosion to make your business more successful.

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78.367 - 93.522 Greg Isenberg

Put it another way, you're going to teach us how to make money doing things that have the complete opposite to do with AI. The anti-trend, meaning the complete opposite of all this AI stuff that I normally talk about.

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93.653 - 109.655 Jonathan Courtney

Yeah, I think that there's a massive opportunity or lots of massive opportunities to take a look at what's happening in the AI space, the social media space, the content space, just go the opposite way. And you're going to find that a lot of people want exactly that.

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Chapter 5: How does Jonathan Courtney plan and execute in-person events?

110.155 - 135.81 Jonathan Courtney

And I mean, obviously, I was triggered by your tweet from today, earlier today. I guess you'll bring it up on screen, but just some of the highlights from it are you show this chart. I don't know if you want to bring that chart up on screen, but it showed that in many countries, social media peaked in 2022. And it's the young people who are cutting back on social media first and

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135.79 - 164.802 Jonathan Courtney

which kind of shows the trend that from a perspective of something as powerful as social media, a lot of younger people are starting to get off social media. And I think this trend, I mean, I'm a millennial. I'm in this 35 to 44 range. And myself and a lot of friends have quit social media. The only social media that I'm on is X, and even that I'm trying to get away from.

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164.782 - 191.33 Jonathan Courtney

And I think there's, with these trends, with the AI stuff, just like accelerating everything, especially around content, especially now people can just write stuff without writing, create videos without needing to create or being able to create videos, being able to create all of this like slop or brain rot, as you said in your post. I'm seeing more and more opportunities for the opposite.

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191.37 - 194.434 Jonathan Courtney

And the opposite of that is, You mentioned a couple of things there.

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Chapter 6: What advantages do physical products have over digital offerings?

194.454 - 222.143 Jonathan Courtney

Slow media, like, you know, reading long form articles again, maybe on print. But what I'm literally doing myself is over the last year, I've been moving a lot of the digital elements of my company, which are very profitable and scalable because they're digital, to a much less easy to do in-person version of these products.

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222.123 - 238.714 Jonathan Courtney

And what I'm seeing is a lot more, I'm finding a lot more easy to market these products. I'm able to use like less, I guess, clever marketing techniques to get people to join these in-person events, even though they're actually a lot more expensive.

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238.694 - 260.635 Jonathan Courtney

And an example of that is like, you know, one of our, we sell like certifications for learning facilitation in one of our companies, facilitator.com. And for the last six years, the most popular versions of those certifications have been an online version of the certification, which costs $6,000.

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Chapter 7: How can businesses create perceived value through scarcity?

260.615 - 279.467 Jonathan Courtney

Two years ago, after COVID, I had the feeling people would want to come back in person. I had the feeling that that would also help us stand out because no one else was doing it. Everyone was still doing remote. And so we released a version of the certification, which was $15,000, well, $14,300 in person.

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Chapter 8: What strategies can help build a dedicated audience for in-person events?

279.447 - 306.113 Jonathan Courtney

And three of those events sold out right after announcing them. And so those in-person events now are essentially replacing the digital version of these events or accompanying them, not because they're like, you know, an easier thing to run or because that's like the best way to scale. But just it's so much more enjoyable to market these things because people are

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306.093 - 333.737 Jonathan Courtney

craving these in-person experiences versus you have to kind of... Like with online virtual stuff at the moment, you kind of have to really do the marketing thing. You have to do the marketing shtick to get people excited about it. And how do you differentiate yourself from everybody else? Well, what we're saying now is we have the best in-person way to do this. And it's just so simple. Yeah.

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333.717 - 353.16 Jonathan Courtney

And so our entire marketing behind our full stack facilitator program is this little like Apple like piece of copy, which is in person incredible. So 50% of the marketing is dedicated to you just get to hang out with people and it's working really well.

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353.849 - 362.962 Greg Isenberg

So, okay. So let's unpack that so we can make it extremely tactical for people. So those tactics, people need that sauce.

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362.982 - 365.806 Jonathan Courtney

They need the sauce. Yeah. Not the juice. Sorry. It's the sauce.

366.126 - 395.007 Greg Isenberg

Yeah. And not the tactics either. I don't know what I was saying by saying the tactics, they need the sauce. So I'm going to, I'm going to say that from 2020 to 2022, um, there was a rush to build, we have the best digital community to do XYZ, correct?

395.227 - 400.954 Jonathan Courtney

Absolutely, absolutely. And we were in that rush as well. We were just a little bit earlier, but 2020 is where it exploded.

401.555 - 421.084 Greg Isenberg

Right, so let's talk about this. If you wanted to become, I don't know, A day trader, there's a community for that. What else? If you wanted to become... A facilitator.

423.086 - 423.948 Jonathan Courtney

Just because it's our thing.

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