💡 Business Brainstorms 💡- My favorite ideas of the week
#1 💡
Phil is the founder of my favorite email software and he’s 100% correct here.
Google sucks for recommendations. The algorithm has been gamed to death.
Just in the past two days I’ve asked GPT for recommendations on 2 high ticket decisions (job board in specific region, cloud vector database). Found it extremely useful.
Whoever figures out how to optimise for recommendations by LLMs will win big
#2 💡
I need this and I need it now.
Platforms like Fiverr or Upwork have a horrible signal to noise ratio.
You could validate this simply with a Stripe link, redirect to an Airtable form where people put in what they need to get done in the next 24 hours.
When orders come in you figure out delivery on the backend manually to start with. Just hustle to find someone awesome who can do it, not caring about margins.
Over time you will assemble a network of trusted freelancers and be able to automate the matchmaking.
#3 💡
I’ve noticed a few interested patterns when studying how the smartest people in different fields find success repeatedly:
An Algorithm For Success
Starting point: a well-defined goal.
Develop a theory of change. Work backwards from the goal, in concrete steps, to figure out what you can do to achieve it. There are always multiple paths.
Use simulated annealing as meta strategy. Pick one of the possible paths at random. Identify the step that is most likely to fail. Start here.
After each step, reevalute. Your options are either the next step on the current path or jumping to a different path you picked at random.
Assign a likelihood to succeed to both paths given your current knowledge. Compare them but allow for jumps that seem worse with a certain probability. This makes sure you don’t get stuck in local maxima prematurely.
Regardless of what path you picked, always start with whatever step is most likely to fail next.
Initially do big jumps at random (almost completely disregarding which path seems better).
Then gradually reduce the “temperature”. Only allow jumps to paths that are adjacent to your current path and reduce the probability to jumping to options that seem worse.
#4 💡
This is a great post that highlights the strange and unpredictable ways in which opportunities emerge.
Trying to come up with a grand masterplan is usually a waste of time. Your time is better spent putting yourself out there in whatever small or big way possible.
Tim Ferriss made most of his money by being able to invest early in startups like Uber. The butterfly flaps that eventually brought these opportunities to his doorstep were dozens of blog posts on all kinds of random topics.
#5 💡
Every company has a sales pipeline, few have a retention pipeline.
For example, you can send customers gifts when relevant. Stripe is doing this extremely well for example.
Or you can proactively offer discounts as a reward for longstanding customers.
And just like you can identify sales triggers (data points that indicate a specific company is ready to buy), you can identify retention (anti)-triggers. What data indicates that a customer is about to churn? Once you identified a trigger, you can develop a process to minimize the odds this happens
End Note
As always, if you’re enjoying this brainstorm, 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