💡 Business Brainstorms 💡- My favorite ideas of the week

Sep 16, 2024

Line extension is a marketing strategy that uses an existing brand to introduce a new item into the same product line.
Almost every successful company starts at some point launching more and more products under the same brand.
This is always short term positive but bad long term.
Brand recognition leads to quick adoption of the new product and hence a revenue boost.
However at the same time the brand as a whole becomes weaker since it no longer stands for one thing.
Also: more products = more complexity. The more complex a business the harder it is to scale.
The leader in any category is the brand that is not line extended. What is the world's largest beverage company by market cap in the world? Moutai. Virtually all their revenue comes from one product (“fire water”).
This doesn’t just affect product businesses but also service businesses.
Every time I talk to friends running agencies they talk about introducing new services and offers.
Besides the short term revenue boost this is also tempting since it introduces novelty.
But imo this is always a net negative. It dilutes the focus of the company, introduces an unmanageable amount of complexity, and turns the agency into yet another generic marketing agency. And the more generic an offer the harder the sell.
No one believes you can be good at everything.
The proper way to roll out new products and services is under a new brand. But hardly anyone does this because it requires more effort and the payoff is much slower.

🤝 Validate B2B

Cold email is the best channel to validate B2B products fast and reliably.
With paid ads, you quickly wind up a $2,000 bill with nothing to show for it. Targeting is largely a black box and there is no negative feedback besides no results.
Feedback from your personal network is always biased and says little about the long term potential of your business.
With cold emails, you get unbiased direct feedback that helps you understand how strangers react to your offer.
However, running cold email campaigns that actually reach the people you’re trying to reach is expensive and requires a ton of expertise. Did your campaign flop because you made a deliverability mistake? Or maybe your copy was too confusing? Is the data bad?
That’s why I’ve started offering cold email validation campaigns as a service.
You can test new products, new messaging, and if cold email is a viable channel to grow.
Each campaign leverages all the learnings + infrastructure from my agency where we’ve run 1000+ targeted cold email campaigns for 200+ B2B companies.

(At my agency we only work with established companies that have a clear understanding of their ICP and a proven sales process. There is a 3-month minimum commitment and we say no to early stage companies that want to work with us. Our main focus is helping companies scale, not validating new projects.)

This seems like a huge opportunity.
Rich people want access to exclusive investments but all the standard solutions overpromise and underdeliver.
My friends at Alts.co are one example of a startup trying to provide a better alternative.

Problematic side-effects of plastic have reached mainstream awareness.
At the same time, most grocery stores use ridiculous amounts of plastic. Single cucumbers are wrapped in plastic.
There are a few ‘zero waste’ supermarkets already in Europe but they are too inconvenient for most people, e.g. because you have to bring your owner containers.

This might be primarily a signalling move from Klarna but I’m convinced more and more companies will realise how simple the features of software they’re paying thousands of dollars for every month really are.
SaaS companies were printing money for many years. But it only worked because companies are charging ridiculous margins for what really is just a bunch of CRUD operations.
As the cost of software development and maintenance goes down thanks to tools like Cursor and Zed, SaaS companies will face more pressure; from an increasing number of competitors and from teams building internal tools.