💡 Business Brainstorms 💡- My favorite ideas of the week
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!
#1 💡
It's cool that smartphones have become all-in-one devices. But at the same time, there’s a reason why people buy Kindle devices.
You can of course use a meditation app on your phone. But this means every time you want to meditate, you will be tempted by the millions of other things you could do instead.
Here’s another cool example for time tracking and this a popular single purpose device for writing. Or just think about how popular physical journals still are. I can play music on my iPad or phone but still prefer my Sonos that I can start with a single button press.
Part of the appeal is that if a device is only focused on one use case it can do it much better than any multi purpose device. Another part is the removal of distractions. But most importantly, physical devices become part of your real world environment. For example, that book in your bookshelf will always remind you of a specific idea. This does not happen with the hundreds of books buried in your ebook library.
#2 💡
I could built all the tech we’re using at our agency in a weekend or two.
But it took us 10+ month of testing to find out what’s working and what isn’t.
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#3 💡
It’s kind of silly how people love to talk about the importance of platform risk and how AI, crypto, whatever is just a fad.
A few years ago, I was in the same camp, laughing about people chasing hype trains or thin layers on top of other people's platforms.
Now I understand that this actually not only a valid but an extremely smart strategy. It’s the only way to generate outsized returns in a short amount of time. The world at large is pretty efficient marketplace.
In 1900, the fifth largest industry in the US was whaling. Yep, whaling. Moby Dick, Ahab, that kind of stuff. Within a few years it became completely irrelevant.
But who cares? People made fortunes before technological advances killed the whole industry.
This is a pattern that has existed forever and will continue to exist.
#4 💡
An interesting lesson from Creativity INC by Ed Cartmul: teams who work faster do better.
Those who overthink are wrong as much as fast movers. Difference is that fast teams can turn quicker, and are not too attached to ideas.
Was reminded of this by my recent convo with Tweet Hunter founder Thibault Louis-Lucas. I did the 12-projects-in-12-months thing, but Thibault launched a new product every week for four months.
Most of these projects never went anywhere, but one of them was Tweet Hunter which became a million-dollar business.
#5 💡
Tyler wrote about this trend 2 years ago: “empty SaaS”: you sign up and are dumped into an empty page of rows, record, contacts, expenses, tasks, projects, etc and told to “fill it up with stuff.” The burden of creating value and doing the work is still pushed entirely onto the user.
Pre-loading relevant data is a great example, but even more exciting will be when templates and canned onboarding flows will be replaced by AI-generated pre-configurations after you sign up.
For example, we recently switched to Airtable as our data "source of truth" and project management tool. There are templates you can get some inspiration from but ultimately we had to build out everything from scratch.
Imagine if 90% of the heavy lifting had already been done for us after we signed up. Switching would not have been a difficult decision but a no-brainer.
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