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Build Epic Startups: NotebookLM + Gemini 2.5 Workflow
Blazing Zebra·youtube.com·16 min read·6h ago
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197 segmentsDo you realize that anybody who knows how to use Notebook LM along with Gemini 2.5 can now do the
work of an entire startup team? Today I want to show you how to use Google's massive updates to
these free tools in order to research, build, and promote your ideas. I've spent many hours
experimenting with Gemini's new superior coding capabilities and 1 million token context window
to come up with this step-by-step process for getting your ideas into the world as fast as
possible. You see, while I was running my marketing agency, we worked exclusively with software
companies from unicorn startups all the way to the largest SaaS company in the world. And I've
been shocked at how well you can combine these two tools to rival or even exceed the work of some of
these top-tier teams. Did you know that Sam Altman and his cronies are betting on who's going to create
the first single-person $1 billion company? After watching this, I think you'll agree that that
moment is a lot closer than most people think. So here's the gist of what we're going to get into
today. We're going to use Notebook LM, especially its new Discover feature, to look into the pain
points of your particular customer. Then we're going to use it to look into trends in your specific
industry. Then we're going to use it to look into competitors in your space. We're going to take all
that information and do a smart analysis on it. Then we're going to pass it to Gemini 2.5
to actually build out the software, to build out the marketing website, and to build out the
marketing content. And we're also going to look into Firebase as a way that you can really move from
an MVP or a prototype that Gemini builds directly into a full-fledged web app that you can sell to,
you know, a bunch of people. So it all starts here with our trusty friend, Notebook LM. We're going to
fire up a fresh new notebook. I always get excited when I fire up a fresh new notebook. And I get even
more excited now that this feature is here. This Discover Sources feature is truly a game changer. I
know that word gets thrown around quite a lot, but many of my videos relied on going to Perplexity
to find sources and then dumping those into Notebook LM. You no longer have to do that. This is a very,
very powerful search feature here. And you got to know how to prompt it though, because like
anything, the prompt matters. And for that prompt, I'm jumping right into the cheat sheet. I make a
cheat sheet for every single video that I create. These are all immediately accessible to anybody who
joins my Patreon. So yeah, check that out. There's a link in the description. Starting with the user's
pain point is one way to ensure that your idea is successful. I've seen a lot of software projects
go off the rails when it's just something that a founder thought was a great idea, but didn't have
any valid data to back it up. So we're going to grab this prompt and we're going to dump this
right into the Discover feature of Notebook LM, asking it to go out and look at where these people
are actually voicing their opinions. We're not looking for editorials of what some person thinks
about what some other person thinks about. We're looking for the voice of the customer here.
And the project I'm working on today is a healthcare app that I've been thinking about. I've recently
struggled with some health issues and I've had a lot of trouble understanding my blood lab work,
sharing that blood lab work out. I've gotten it in, it exists in multiple places. You know, there's a
portal here and a portal there. I want to build a software product that compiles all of the data for
my blood work in one place. I think there's a lot of people that could benefit from this,
especially if you tack on some AI capabilities of interpreting that and letting you know, you know,
what these tests mean and potentially, you know, next steps there. So I'm just saying find sources on
sites such as Reddit, Quora and niche forums to find user pain points regarding understanding,
accessing and sharing blood work, labs and similar healthcare data. Let's just submit that.
And the better you prompt this, the more you can just select all of what is in here. Cool. Some of
these are really awesome. I'm going to leave that first one out. I don't know that that's exactly what
we need, but we're going to import all of those different sources. Now that all those are in there,
I want to label these. So I'm going to rename the source. And for all of these, I'm just going to put
user in all caps, copy and paste that save. This will allow us to easily find our user data from our
industry data from our competitor data. All right. So there is all of our user pain point data. We're
going to go back to this discover and back into the cheat sheet here. And I'm going to say gather
studies from leading consulting firms and other credible sources on, you know, exactly what you're
looking to do. In this case, it's consumer healthcare apps looking for trends. It exclude anything that
was published before 2024. So we're just going to drop this in to find credible resources on industry
trends. I'm going to import those. And these ones I'm going to rename, just put this label, all caps
trends in front of them. So we can easily see at a glance our trends from our user info. Trust me,
this is going to come in helpful later on when we have a bunch of sources in there. Cool. So we've got all
of our trends, we got all of our user, this one didn't come through. So we just remove that no big deal. And
now finally, we want to look for some competitors. And importantly, we don't want to find reviews of these
competitors. We're really just looking for their home pages, because that's what we really want most from
them. So I'm grabbing this prompt here, dropping that right into this discover. Again, looking for
the most successful. Again, you can put in whatever you want here. For me, it's consumer healthcare apps
and tracking software. Please return only the homepage or the app page of fast growing startups
or established market leaders. Ideally, we want a mix of those of the new hot products, as well as the
ones that are, you know, really dominating the market here. And we're looking for their main links
to their main home pages. It does an awesome job of this. So really think about how you steer that
prompt. We've got my fitness pal headspace and ovulation tracker. Perfect. That's an interesting
one. Not exactly what I was looking for. But that could be helpful as well. That Y Combinator. Let's
import these. And I'm going to rename these, I'm going to add the competitor label to these. All right.
And just like that, we have a powerful asset here for our startup idea. We've got a bunch of
information about our user pain points, trends in the industry and our competitors. So let's get into
how we're going to use this next. First, I want to retitle this blood works, which is sort of the
placeholder name for this app that I'm working on. Okay. So now we're moving on to this step two
analysis and strategy. And this first part of it, we're getting back to those pain points,
a very simple prompt that just says, please analyze the pain points listed in these sources.
We're going to copy and paste that in. But the key here is make sure only these user sources are
selected. So we're going to select all of our user sources. We're going to leave everything else
unselected and ask for a pain point summary. And this is exactly what we're looking for. These
healthcare systems, electronic records are very frustrating experience, miscommunications between
medical professionals and patients. So now we're going to save this note here. Then you got to click
into the note and convert this to a source. So now we've added that as a source down here. And we're
going to rename this to keep everything straight. We're going to rename this source user pain points.
So that one jumps right out to us there. So the next step here, now that we have those pain points
analyzed as a cross reference, those against the industry trends using this prompt. So we're going
to just grab this. And in that same exact chat string, we're going to copy and paste this in right
here into the chat string. We're going to turn all of the user sources off and these trend sources on.
So now we are cross-referencing these trends with the pain points using this prompt that basically says,
please return an aggregate of the user trends based on, you know, XYZ what we're looking into as it
relates to the conversation above. Let that run. And here is where those pain points align with the
trends here. Beautiful analysis that we can just save as a note. And then once that note is saved, we want
to open up that note and convert this to a source so that we can reference it here in the sources. And we'll save
that and rename that as our trends summary. So we have the pain points summary, we have the trends
as it relates to our pain points summary in here. And now's when things get exciting, we can start mapping
the features of our prototype of this software. So now I'm going to refresh the chat string, I'm going to select
our user pain points and our trend summary, and I'm going to grab this prompt, copy that right in. This just says
using the selected sources, please outline the key features of an app that addresses the identified
concerns here. Awesome. And this does a really detailed job. So what we want to do is focus it on
something that is more of an MVP or a minimum viable product or a prototype that we can start with and
build upon. So that's where I use this prompt that'll simplify this down a little bit to something we can wrap
our heads around initially. Awesome. This is now simplified that down into some key features for that
MVP. And now I'm just going to follow up with this prompt, which is sort of a meta prompt. It's a prompt
asking for a prompt that we can then put into Gemini to start building this app out. I'm asking it to use
JavaScript specifically because that's the language that I'm trying to focus on. I have a whole nother video
on my path of learning how to code with AI. I'm going to link to that video now, because I think there's some
helpful things in there if you really want to build production ready software. But let's see what this
comes up with. All right, we've got a pretty robust prompt here that we can now go over to Gemini with. So I'm
going to copy this out of Notebook LM. We're hopping over to Gemini.Google.com. We're going to drop this right in,
got to clean up some of this beginning here. And I'm going to title this blood works. We got to turn
this canvas feature on, we're going to let that run. And there it goes building our Java script app.
And there we have it. This is a working app here. This is the prompt that we entered in it ran for a
while. And I want to show you a trick if you want to get even more serious about this, go to this code,
we're going to select all and moving out of this MVP prototype into a real legit piece of software. We go to
Firebase, another Google product, get started, log in here. And I'm dropping in everything that we created from
that working prototype right in here. I'm going to click run. And then I'm going to follow it up with this prompt,
which just says here's some code from an app I created, we can use this code as is because otherwise it kind of assumes
that you're grabbing it from somebody else and it wants to reinvent the wheel. So got to tell it,
no, hey, I built this so we can take it from here and then progress it. Well, just like that,
ask it, say, feel free to make any enhancements you want to improve on it. And I like to say,
use this shad CN, which is a, anytime you add that in, it's going to make it look even better. I think
that is a tailwind CSS thing that makes these web apps look really good. So we'll copy and paste that
in and we'll follow that up changes I want to make. And it's going to go through and start actually
improving this and enhancing it in various ways and actually building it from basically one file
into a whole set of files. So it's kind of hard to see here, I'll zoom in, but it's now taking really
just that what was a one page app and building out all these different TypeScript files, really turning
that into a true code base that then you can edit and start to improve upon just like any other,
you know, software tool out there. And this Firebase Studio is really awesome from moving from a prototype
into a legit production ready piece of software. This rivals Cursor and others. So something to check
out as it all stays within that Google ecosystem. Okay, so we've built the app and now we're going to
design this homepage for this app and our notebook LM notebook is going to come super handy in there.
Remember all that competitor information that we pulled, we're going to use that now we're going
to grab this prompt, we're going to copy and paste that in, we're going to make sure all the different
competitors are turned on here, we want to give it access to these competitor resources. Now, we're also
going to give it access to this MVP prompt, so it knows the tool that we're building, and it can cross
reference that with all these different competitors' homepages. And just saying, hey, craft a prompt for
a large language model to generate a visually compelling and effective landing page or homepage
for this product. So again, that is a meta prompt, a prompt that we're using to create a prompt that
we're going to put into Gemini to create the marketing webpage. Because you know, when you go to a new piece
of software, you don't go right into the software, you go into a homepage that you can then click get
started and you know, access the app that way. So that's what we're going to use to build out next.
All right, so that has run and created this landing page prompt, remember to save it as a note and then
save that note as a source. And this is the prompt that we're going to use that summarizes the tool and
all of the language from these other competitors into a prompt that will build our homepage for this
thing. Grabbing that, copying and pasting that back into Gemini here. Again, we want to turn Canvas on
and let's start building the marketing website for this product. And we're running here. All right,
and there we have our little app here. I want to change the name here to make sure it says Bloodworks.
There we go. And it rocked those icons. I've had trouble with those icons before, but this time it
did it. So now to publish this app and website to the web, I'm going to use Replit. It's what I'm
most familiar with. You can again also use that Firebase option, but I'm just going to grab this
prompt here that will allow us to take what we've already created and drop it into Replit and get it
online. So when you open Replit, you're going to be met with its agent here. And we're just asking it,
hey, take the document attached and use this exact code. No need to change anything. I'm simply looking
to create a new Replit with this and host it on Replit. So we're adding that prompt in and then
we're grabbing the code from Gemini. So here is what we created in Gemini. We grab this code,
select all, copy, paste that in, start building and it builds it. So it's going to ask you to look
through a plan. This is all there. And I think you can just approve the plan and start. And ideally,
it won't try to reinvent the wheel, but it'll just take that file and help you host it right here.
And again, this is a place just like Firebase where you can then start to improve it
and add features and build it more into a full working code base. There we go. Looks awesome.
Now all we got to do is click Deploy. And there's a few different ways to deal with this.
Autoscale usually works well. Click, click, click. Keep clicking forward. And there you go. Now we have
both the home page here. This is live. Anybody can visit it. And we have it connected when you
you got to work through this in Replit and just fix the link. We'll
click get started. It opens the fully hosted app here. So we've got the home page. We got the app
all online, all just a few hours of work maximum. Now we got to promote it. All right. So now step
five, we're going to move into creating a content strategy for our new startup idea. And this is
really what my background is in. I ran a content marketing agency for over 10 years, worked with all
sorts of software companies before I really decided to pivot into this new world of AI. And I started this
Blazing Zebra channel. Blazing, we got to move fast. And Zebra, we've got to, you know, identify our own
strengths, our own passions and bring them to this new world of AI. So I hope you subscribe and follow
along with these videos as you begin to pivot and transition into your new AI career with some
intentionality. And ideally it's a more fulfilling career than any that you've had in the past. So for
the content strategy, we're going to use this prompt here that just says develop a content marketing
strategy, outlining four hub pieces of content, each supported by four blog posts that link to those
different traffic sources there. And we're going to copy and paste this right back into our notebook
LM notebook. For this one, you can pretty much have all of the sources on and see what it comes up with.
Awesome. So it's returned already a pretty killer content marketing campaign. And if you've done
anything with AI, you probably know how to create a blog post or even a long form piece of content.
But I bet you don't know how to create infographics and interactive pieces of content. So that's what I
want to show you how to do next. So I'm grabbing this prompt. This is another meta prompt, a prompt
that creates a prompt for designing a visually compelling infographic related to one of the hub
page ideas that it came up with. Very cool. That is pretty big. We're going to save that as a note,
as we always do and save that, convert that to a source. So we have that going to copy and paste all
this right into Gemini. Turn on that canvas. I'm also going to supply the code from our main landing page
here so that it can follow the brand, you know, look and feel that we've already been working on.
I'm adding that there. You can also upload it here as a separate file, though. So let's let that go
and see if we can create that. So here's the result of that infographic here. You can see it follows
all of the styles of our previous creations. We can get that online using Replit the same way we got the
app and the homepage online and we can start to build out our content portal that way. But there is so
much you can do from here, not only infographics, but you can create cluster visualizations. Here's
just a peek at what this can do when it comes to creating interactive content. I used it to just
create an interactive mind map for about all the notebook LM features, limitations, etc. So you can
create content like this and get it online copying the code in using that same process I showed you on
Replit or inside of Firebase. This cheat sheet is absolutely packed with a ton of good
information. It goes through everything that we went through here today, but then dives even deeper
into each step of this process. So if building out software and businesses like these is something
that you're interested in, definitely check out my Patreon. There's a link in the description. You can
support this channel, grab this cheat sheet and over 125 others instantly. There's some coaching options in
there as well. I've got a video that dives a lot deeper into the strategy portion of what we went over
today. So if you're serious about this, check that video out next. Make your dreams come true!
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