💡 Business Brainstorms 💡- My favorite ideas of the week

🛳️ Cruise hustles

• I went on a cruise last month and one thing I learned is that there are tons of businesses just focused on providing local tours for cruise ship passengers.

• At least by my napkin math, these are incredibly lucrative businesses.

• People happily pay $150+ for a 4 hour bus tour.

• A typical bus can accommodate 56 passengers.

• 56*$150 = $8400/tour. With two tours per day, this amounts to $16,800/day.

• Costs are for the bus charter, the driver, and a tour guide. Buses can be chartered for ~$1k/day. The driver and tour guide will get a normal salary, say, $60/hour. For 8 hours of work, this equals $60*8*2= $960. There are some additional costs for fuel and parking fees, let’s say $1000.

• So in total, the company makes ~$13,840 per day. In many towns, the cruise ship season lasts ~3 months. New cruise ships come every day. Modern ships accommodate 3000+ guests and it is not uncommon for multiple ships to arrive the same day. So in just one season, a company makes: 90*$12,800= $1,152,000. And that’s with just one bus. Most of the companies operate multiple buses and offer different tours. All of the buses I saw were completely full.

• You don’t even need a crazy marketing budget. List your tour on GetYourGuide and make sure your tour guide is ready to sell tickets close to where people get on land.

• The economics of walking tours (also very popular) are even better.

🤖 AI Summaries

• Summate helps you track multiple businesses effortlessly. It condenses newsletters, YouTube, and RSS from various industries into one AI-powered daily digest, saving you hours of research time.

(Summate sponsored this issue of Business Brainstorms.)

📈 AI Startup Data

• I was inspired by this tweet to scrape all startups listed on theresanaiforthat.com and enriched it to understand: 1) who’s getting the most organic traffic? 2) whose organic traffic is growing the fastest? 3) who’s spending the most on Google ads 4) who’s increasing their ad spend the fastest?

• Fun to browse through the data to see who is quietly crushing it.

• You can access the full dataset here.

• PS: not all companies listed are strictly AI companies. Some are companies with AI features.

• PPS: lmk if you find any cool under-the-radar companies in the list!

💀 Data-driven marketing

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• This is part of a bigger trend where more and more companies are waking up to the fact that data-driven marketing isn’t holding up to its promises.

• One example from my own company is that is that it sometimes can seem like a cold email campaign isn’t doing much in terms of results. But the moment you turn it off, a significant chunk of your inbound traffic vanishes. What’s happening here is that people are sceptical and sophisticated and hence do their own research. They never reply to the cold email. But they search for the company name, visit the website, and then book a call directly.

• A good read on the topic is this post by Rand Fishkin: "Attribution is Dying. Clicks are Dying. Marketing is Going Back to the 20th Century.”

🍀 Make your own luck

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• This is a useful reminder that you don’t have to wait until you get picked or discovered.

• The most successful people make their own luck.

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.

If your B2B business looking to systematize and scale your outbound efforts, my agency Sales.co might be able to help.

You can learn more about sponsoring Business Brainstorms here.

Have a great week,

Jakob