Hey guys, I’m making video series on how I built ContactOut to 8 figures in revenue. Step by step videos on how to start a startup with screen shares of our teams exact process for competitor research, customer interviews, product design, marketing and sales. Actionable and tactical stuff – no fluff.

Here’s part 1:

How to come up with startup ideas

1. Pick an industry (with a big market size)
2. Study 100 companies
3. Study their product
4. Study marketing channels
5. Study sales process
6. Talk to ex-employees, ex-founders
7. Talk to 50 industry experts
8. Talk to 100 users
9. Become an expert and create a 10x better solution

Picking an industry:

This is because it’s easier to inspire people to join you, it’s easier to raise money, and you also have more room for error.

If you’re trying to solve artificial general intelligence, Even if you get 1 percent of the way there, you’ll still make 10 billion because it’s a trillion dollar problem.

Whereas if you tried to start a restaurant, if you execute perfectly, your maximum upside is maybe 3 million.

An easy way to pick an industry with a massive problem to solve is to follow venture capital companies.

I like to read.

A16Z, where they talk about AI, biology and health, the latest developments in consumer technology, in enterprise software, games, crypto and lots of other stuff.

Also FirstRound capital’s review series and Khosla venture.

There’s books like Singularity is Near from Ray Kurtzweil.

They have a university called the Singularity University.

They have like a YouTube channel as well

As well as Craig Venter that worked on the Human Genome Project.

Brian Johnson, some crazy guy that’s trying to live forever on YouTube.

Gates Foundation for all the developments for global impact, like solving poverty, sanitation, vaccinations, as well as nuclear fusion.

For education, I love Global Silicon Valley, which is the biggest ed tech conference in the world. They have speakers like Sheryl Sandberg and Bill Gates and lots of famous teachers and educators.

I also like to just listen to demo days from the famous startup accelerators, like 500 Startups or Techstars. This is 20-30 companies pitching in a video and ideas in concentrated form.

Podcasts are great. 20VC and inDepth have a lot of startup stories and ideas.

There’s Marketing School from Neil Patel.

There’s AI Breakdown.

And then I like to find people on Twitter to follow.

I would go to Spark Toro, where I can enter any topic and it will tell me the top influencers, Twitter accounts, subreddits and websites to follow.

For AI there’s Andrew NG, Andrej Karpathy.