Your Next Million Dollar Business Idea

Happy Tuesday 👋 and welcome to our hundreds of new subscribers! Today’s issue is jam-packed with news, useful automations, and inspiring stories to kickstart or supplement your entrepreneurial journey. So grab a cup of coffee, sit back, and enjoy this little break from your busy day.

TL;DR: OpenAI’s planned $3 B buyout of Windsurf tanked, and Google swooped in with a $2.4 B reverse acquihire—snagging the CEO, cofounder, and R&D team to supercharge Gemini’s coding chops.

🤝 Windsurf CEO jumps ship to DeepMind – Varun Mohan and cofounder Doug Chen join DeepMind to lead “agentic coding” for Gemini. Google scored top talent without lifting a finger on full acquisition.

💸 $2.4B for talent, not control – Google paid big bucks but took only a non‑exclusive license to Windsurf tech. Own the brains, not the stock.

🛠️ OpenAI left empty-handed – OpenAI was days away from a $3 B deal before imploding over Microsoft patent rights. Now Google wins the grand prize.

🚀 Gemini gets a boost – Windsurf’s team joins DeepMind to turbocharge agentic coding—opening the door to smarter developer tools under Gemini’s umbrella.

🎭 The “reverse acquihire” takeover era – Google’s move mirrors past hacks—hire leadership, license tech, but skip the regulatory bite. It’s becoming the default playbook in the AI talent war.

TL;DR: From rural hot tub hustles to AI-powered pen pals, this convo dives into the weird and wonderful ways entrepreneurs are blending nostalgia, niche services, and cutting-edge tools to print money. The future is part Jetsons, part Little House on the Prairie—and it smells like chlorine and cash.

🛁 Hot tubs = hot profits – One guy in Idaho is making serious bank cleaning and moving hot tubs—no ads, just word-of-mouth. Sometimes the million-dollar idea is sitting in your neighbor’s backyard, soaking.

💌 Snail mail + stories = subscription magic – A website that mails romantic 1940s-style letters and racks up millions with near-zero churn. It’s analog storytelling with digital margins. Nostalgia sells.

🚤 Vacation rentals are SaaS-ing up –Think concierge services for lake houses or jet ski rental software with built-in waivers and payments. If tourists are renting it, someone should be SaaS-ing it.

📧 Shopify hacks > spam filters – Using Shopify’s order confirmation emails as a cold outreach method is genius-level email jiu-jitsu. Land in the primary inbox, not purgatory.

📂 Niche directories print leads, not ads – Build a laser-focused AI-powered directory for lawyers, dentists, or wedding vendors—and then upsell SEO and lead gen. Think Yellow Pages with a chatbot and way better margins.

TL;DR: Forget boring drip campaigns—this new playbook turns AI agents, modular plugins, and social scraping into an unfair marketing advantage. Here’s how marketers are automating everything but the vibe.

🤖 AI agents are your new overachieving interns – They’ll scrape Reddit, write emails, and even take sales calls while you sleep. It’s like hiring a dozen marketers with zero HR headaches.

🛠️ Modular code plugins turn AI into a Swiss Army knife – Connect Google Drive, Stripe, Airtable—whatever you need. Suddenly your AI isn’t just chatting; it’s closing deals and sending invoices.

🎥 Viral content on autopilot? Yes plz – Automatically turn trending Reddit posts into short-form videos with AI voiceovers. It’s the laziest way to farm attention since clickbait headlines.

📞 Voice AI for 24/7 sales hustle – These agents don’t just talk—they sell, collect feedback, and give you call transcripts with customer gold. It’s like having a call center that doesn’t need coffee breaks.

📈 Email marketing but actually smart – Use viral videos to grab segmented leads and automate follow-up based on interests. Forget blasting everyone; vibe marketing is all about sending the right DM slide.

TL;DR: Trevor turned a boring but crucial SMB finance headache into SaaS gold, nailed marketplace distribution, and flipped it on Acquire.com. Here’s the playbook for anyone looking to spreadsheet their way to a successful exit.

🚀 Finance bros, but make it SaaS – Trevor spotted SMBs drowning in janky spreadsheets and built Genius Sheets to pull QuickBooks data straight into Excel and Google Sheets. It’s the unsexy, practical niche that actually pays.

📈 Hooked into the right platform – Early growth was all hustle—cold emailing CFOs and tapping alumni networks until they partnered officially with QuickBooks. That listing turned them from scrappy sales to easy distribution.

🏷️ Price low, sell high – Trevor listed the company on Acquire.com at a tempting price to spark a bidding war. Multiple offers later, he walked away with a higher sale price and a lesson in marketplace psychology.

🤝 Ship early, talk to users, repeat – Don’t spend too long perfecting before launch. Genius Sheets found its footing once they shipped, iterated fast, and listened to the people actually using it.

🎤 From spreadsheets to speech-to-CRM – Not content to retire, Trevor’s next act is voice-controlled CRM data entry for sales teams. Because why type notes when you can just talk your pipeline into Salesforce?

TL;DR: Grok 4 is Musk’s monster AI model with 1.7 trillion parameters ready to ace your math exams and automate your business—just don’t expect it to be cheap or lightning-fast. Here’s what you need to know before you plug it into your workflow.

🧠 Exceptional reasoning, if you can afford it – With top-tier performance in math, code, and physics, Grok 4 benchmarks like a serious research assistant. But it’s priced and built like one too, most users won’t run it casually.

🛠️ Automation-ready via NIDN + tool calling – Grok 4 integrates with automation platforms like Tavi and Perplexity, enabling multi-step workflows that pull live data, analyze it, and trigger real-world actions.

📉 Performance comes with tradeoffs – Latency and a smaller context window make it a bit clunky for fast-paced use. It’s powerful, but not seamless, and less responsive under heavier loads.

💸 Not for basic tasks – For everyday prompts or writing, Grok 4 is overkill. The smarter approach is pairing it with smaller, cheaper models and using Grok selectively, like strategic deployment.

📈 Learning curve still exists – Nate emphasizes that deploying Grok well takes planning: prompt design, usage limits, and understanding how its agent stack works. It’s not plug-and-play—but for the right use case, it’s worth the effort.