API for simple manual online tasks, pickleball for surfing, freelancer laptop stickers, ...
Hey,
this is Jakob Greenfeld, author of the Business Brainstorms newsletter - every week I write this email to share the most interesting trends, frameworks, opportunities, and ideas with you.
Let's dive in!
💡 Opportunities
“I want an AI companion that I can share my goals with and is integrated with key apps, that will call me on my bullsh** and help me course-correct. "Hey, you've been scrolling IG for 30 mins. Is this how you want to spend your Sunday?" "Hey, you said you wanted to learn []. You haven't done that in 9 days. Here's an easy step you can take today!" "Hey, it's 2pm and you haven't moved much. Time for a walk? The weather is [] until 4PM." - Steph Smith
“I want to be able to call an API and, in real-time, have a person take care of a simple online task. Are there any services that offer this? Mechanical Turk comes to mind. Any others?” - Marc Köhlbrugge
“Pickleball is to Tennis what xxxx is to surfing. What’s xxxx?” - Moiz Ali
Fun framework to brainstorm new sport ideas.
“I once wrote about someone selling these kind of laptop stickers online. Looks like they went out of business. But I still think it's a great idea. Every freelancer who works from a cafe/library should have a sticker like this on their laptop. It's a free mini billboard.” - Niall Doherty
🛠 Things Worth Checking Out
Grow your Twitter account faster and spend more time running your business with Pete Codes’ ghostwriting services. Read how it works.
My agency is now called Sales.co instead of Damn Good Leads but but we’re still 100% focused on helping agencies and SaaS companies grow using cold email. And we’re finally ready to onboard a few more clients after closing the doors for a few weeks. Learn more here.
👨🎓 Read This
Dan Hock wrote a great post on what he calls “The Unbundling Fallacy” that adds some long-needed nuance.
Unbundling is an often-referenced framework that aims to describe a pattern in which the incumbents are becoming lazy and fail to service certain niche audiences. As a result, there is an opportunity for startups that can better serve those niches.
Dan’s point is that unbundling in itself with maybe a “little bit better” UX is not enough.
He identifies three key criteria and argues that “without them unbundling is unlikely to be successful”
customer LTV must be sufficiently high
negative network effects
a highly heterogeneous mode of interaction that the target group of customers would greatly prefer
From "The Rebundling of Craigslist" by Josh Breinlinger
💸 Revenue Signals
“a mega influencer trained chatgpt4 on thousands of hours of her youtube content and is now selling access to it as a virtual gf for $1/ minute.
she's already made over 70k in a week” - decrypt
SiteGPT is at almost $15k MRR now. (“ChatGPT for every website”)
Assista just passed $2k MRR. (time tracking bot for trello)
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.
Have a great week,
Jakob