The Startup Ideas Podcast

I sit down with Frey Chu to go deep on how to use Claude Code to build AI-coded directories, specifically how to tackle the hardest part: getting valuable data. Frey walks us through three real-world directory examples (a funeral home directory, a senior living directory, and GasBuddy), we play a game guessing their traffic and monetization, and then he does a full live walkthrough of the seven-step process he used to build a luxury restroom trailer directory in four days for under $250. I also ask him about the future of directories in a world where LLMs are changing how people search.

Timestamps

00:00 – Intro

02:15 – What you’ll learn

03:00 – Directory Game:Parting(Funeral Home Directory)

05:42 – Directory Game: A Place for Mom (Senior Living Directory)

08:00 – Directory Game: GasBuddy (Crowdsourced Gas Price Directory)

12:32 – The Data Moat Thesis

14:02 – Luxury Restroom Trailers: The Niche Directory Demo

15:52 – Before & After: WordPress Directory vs. Claude Code Directory

19:04 – Cost Breakdown: Built in 4 Days for Under $250

21:23 – Step 1: Scraping Raw Data with Outscraper

22:25 – Step 2: Cleaning Data with Claude Code

23:27 – Step 3: Using Crawl4AI for Automated Website Verification

28:01 – Step 4: Enriching Trailer Inventory Data

31:33 – Step 5: Scraping & Verifying Images with Claude Vision

36:33 – Step 6: Amenities, Features & Filter Data

38:31 – Step 7: Service Areas

39:15 – Niche Directory Ideas: Dementia Care, ADA Bathrooms, Tap Water Quality

43:38 – For Naysayers: Is Building a Directory Worth It in 2026?

47:51 – LLMs, AI Search & the Future of Directories

Links Mentioned:

Outscraper: https://startup-ideas-pod.link/outscraper

Crawl4AI: https://startup-ideas-pod.link/crawl4AI

Key Points

Data is the moat for any successful directory — and with Claude Code plus Crawl4AI, the hardest part (data cleaning and enrichment) is now dramatically faster and cheaper.

Every successful directory helps people save time, save money, or make money — and price transparency is a massive, underserved opportunity across boring niches.

Frey built a fully enriched luxury restroom trailer directory in four days for under $250, a process that would have taken 2,000+ hours of manual work.

Monetization depends on the niche: lead generation, vertical SaaS, agency services, ads, debit cards, affiliate, and marketplace models all work.

Directories remain strong in an AI search world because users browsing a directory are in the decision-making phase, especially in high-stakes niches like health, legal, finance, and senior living.

Building a directory is one of the best playgrounds to learn Claude Code, SEO, and lead generation — even if the first one is just a learning exercise.

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 FREY ON SOCIAL

X/Twitter: https://x.com/freychu

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FreyChu/featured

ShipYourDirectory: https://www.shipyourdirectory.com/

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