AirBnB for professional services, meme-making, weighted hoodies, ...
Hey,
this is Jakob Greenfeld, author of the Business Brainstorms newsletter - every week I write this email to help you level up your entrepreneurial game.
Since I’m committed to making this newsletter as useful as possible, I’d love to hear what you currently like or don’t like about it. I prepared a super short survey here. Takes less than 20 seconds.
Now let's dive into today's ideas, trends, and opportunities.
💡 Social Listening
“If anyone can successfully build a service that lets me reliably pick professional-services providers with the same level of confidence that I pick an AirBnb (not 100%, but pretty good, with an expectation for reasonable mediation and fallback coverage if the offering is radically different than what’s described), I would happily pay a 20% premium on those services versus the existing “ask friends for referrals and cross your fingers” status quo.” - Hacker News
“I wish Twitter had an ad library.” - Twitter
“I’d join a meme-making cohort-based course.” - Twitter
🤖 AI Idea of the Week
The Idea: Vacation Planning Service for Families
The Pain Points: As a family, we have a hard time figuring out what to do on vacation. The kids have their own ideas of what they want to do, and the parents have their own ideas of what they want to do. This often leads to family vacations that are a mix of what everyone wants to do.
The Opportunity: Create a service that helps families pick vacation activities that everyone will enjoy. This can be a mix of online tools and in-person concierge service.
📈 Trends of the Week
Weighted hoodies are designed to simulate the feeling of somebody hugging you to naturally release serotonin and oxytocin hormones for a quick boost to a person's mood.
It is also claimed that they improve circulation and even soothe aching joints.
“Prompt engineer for large [machine learning] models is going to be a legitimate profession.” - Twitter
Prompt engineering is the process of discovering prompts / inputs which yield useful or desired results when you put them into machine learning models like GPT-3.
Finding prompts that reliably yield desired results is an art and requires lots of experience with a specific model.
👨🎓 Framework of the Week
The Framework: Look at a market like a buyer.
Explanation: Browse sites like Microns, Flippa, Microacquire, and Empire Flippers and do research on what kind of businesses are doing well and why. This is not only a great way to discover profitable niches and business but also helps to understand customer acquisition channels and what businesses spend money on. I’m a fan of the Microns newsletter as it’s not just a list of projects for sale but is always a really entertaining read.
💭 Prompt of the Week
Prompt: How can you create a new niche by going 'functional' in a mainly 'emotional' market or vice versa?
Example: Oura created a ring (typically an emotional buying decision) that serves as a health tracker. Masterclass turned something functional (learning) into something emotional.
💸 Revenue Signals of the Week
brought to you by Revenue Watcher
Indie form builder Tally is now making $22k/month. (“the easiest way to create beautiful forms for free”)
Linen generates around $1000/month. (“make slack and discord communities google-searchable”)
I’m pretty sure the number is now significantly higher after a blog post by the founder went viral on Hacker News.
TinyPilot KVM made $74k last month. (“a low-cost, open-source device for remote server management”)
The TinyPilor founder wrote a highly entertaining postmortem of his recent website redesign. Tons of valuable lessons should you ever consider hiring an agency.
📚 Business Read of the Week
This thread is full of crazy examples of what’s really going on behind the scenes of successful startups. I love reading these kinds of stories because they really help me overcome imposter syndrome when it comes to my projects.
If others can charge money for things barely held together by duct tape, so can you.
📢 Shoutouts
Sam Dickie writes an awesome newsletter where he shares the latest digital products, fascinating articles and resources from some of the best new and established online creatives.
The Slice is a fun newsletter that helps readers discover emerging tools, actionable reads and growth nuggets. Jonas recently celebrated issue #100!
Max Haining is the guy behind the 100 Days of NoCode challenge and writes a cool newsletter where he shares bitesized no-code lessons. He’s also about to kickstart a new round of his No-Code MVP Bootcamp. Seems like a fun way to learn the fundamentals of no-code and build a first MVP.
End Note
As always, if you’re enjoying this report, I’d love it if you shared it with a friend or two. You can send them here to sign up.
And should you come across any interesting businesses, trends, or ideas this week, send them my way!
Have a great week,
Jakob