Hey,
this is Jakob Greenfeld, author of the Business Brainstorms newsletter - every week I write this email to help you level up your entrepreneurial game and discover better opportunities.
Let's dive into today's ideas, trends, and opportunities.
đĄ Social Listening
âMy family went to visit family this weekend and I stayed home to do taxes, which on the one hand âYay I am sufficiently organized to get an extremely complex situation distilled for accountants to fileâ and OTOH clearly there is a company that if it existed would buy me a weekendâ - Patrick McKenzie
Really just a reminder that doing taxes is still such an incredibly painful problem for almost all self-employed people.
Competent accountants are usually not willing to work with you since they can make 10x more by working with big companies. And even if you find one, thereâs usually still a lot you have to do yourself.
So everyone simply accepted that they have to waste a few days every year on tax stuff that really should be automated/outsourced.
Itâs not even about optimizing taxes, but really just enthusiastically complying.
âWhat's the equivalent of Ahrefs/Semrush but for TikTok? That lets you search for high volume keywords/hashtags, ideally filtering for low competition?â - Charlie Ward
In case you havenât heard the news: TikTok is the new Google.
Okay not really, but thereâs definitely always a huge opportunity to import successful tools into a new ecosystem.
âAlways thought that "college cafeteria" would be a model that could work somewhere with population density.â - Eric Jorgensen
I have a subscription at a local coffee shop here in my local town in Denmark. Itâs awesome. I pay around $30/month for âunlimitedâ filter coffee (you can order a new one every two hours). There are also more expensive subscriptions that include fancier drinks.
Really wish there was something similar for food.
Or you could do the Costco model: Food sold at cost. Memberships = profit.
Costco for X is generally an interesting framework. Italic, for example, is applying the Costco model to clothing.
âIndie Hacker product idea: ChartMogul/Profitwell competitor that has: - useful iOS app - no bogus MRR movements like these $0.01 from CM - costs $50-100/ month Distribute on Stripe app marketplace? Happy to pay & give feedback if someone builds this!â - Andy Cloke
đ Trend Signals of the Week
I today prepared this list of subreddits that are exploding right now. A few highlights below.
Sales engineers specialize in facilitating the sales process for technologically and scientifically advanced products.
It seems to be a job title thatâs growing rapidly in popularity. (Not just in terms of Google search interest but also by looking at the /r/salesengineers subreddit.)
/r/DoneDirtCheap is a job board where anyone can offer their services âwell below market rateâ.
Could be an interesting opportunity to unbundle this subreddit.
One possible angle: When youâre just starting out it can be extremely difficult to get a foot in the door. No one will reply to your messages on Upwork, for example, until you have a proven track record. So having a marketplace for people just starting out who are willing to work for free or offer their services well below market rates, could be a win-win.
Fiverr definitely was DoneDirtCheap when they started. It was always crystal clear what you were paying ($5!) and what you were getting. Now itâs really just another freelancer marketplace.
âThis is a request forum for people who would like to see their ideas, photos, and concepts created by both paid and volunteered artists.â
Definitely another interesting unbundling opportunity.
Maybe add some AI image generation to the mix? Maybe the platform could work a bit like 99Designs?
đ¨âđ Framework of the Week
The Framework: Where thereâs muck, thereâs brass.
Explanation: âThe one thing that so many of todayâs cute startups have in common is that all they have is a simple little Ruby-on-Rails Ajax site that has no barriers to entry and doesnât solve any gnarly problems. So many of these companies feel insubstantial and fluffy because, out of necessity (the whole company is three kids and an iguana), they havenât solved anything difficult yet. Until they do, they wonât be solving problems for people. People pay for solutions to their problems.â
đ Prompt of the Week
The Prompt: Where do people have a good reason to rent something instead of buying it? Where could you create a new category by selling it instead?
Example: A lot of SaaS tools fit the bill. It can be very expensive to pay a monthly subscription per user every month for years. So offering an option where people pay just once and are then able to download the software + run it themselves can be a very attractive offer. (People still might want to buy a new version every now and then just as they did with Adobe Photoshop back in the days.)
đ¸Â Revenue Signals of the Week
âTwitter's new products like Super Follows, and Twitter Blue, really aren't generating much revenue - $190k MRRâ đŹ
Tiny Powerups is now at $2.6k MRR. (âboost your Trello boards with all of our pups on unlimited boards.â)
Typebot is now at $1600 MRR. (âOpen-source conversational forms builderâ)
FeatureBase is at $698 MRR. (âEasily stay on top of user feedback with our feedback boardsâ)
QuestGen is at $633 MRR. (âGenerate quizzes from any text in one click using AI.â)
Sheet Monkey is now at $500 MRR. (âSubmit your forms to Google Sheetsâ)
đ Business Read of the Week
This is an amazing read by Zach Shakked, the creator of apps like Hashtag Expert, Command, and Caption Expert:
My highlights:
âBuilding a product is the act of repeatedly testing hypotheses that solve a particular problem.â
âIn terms of thinking of app ideas, you want your brain to be fertile ground so that when lightning strikes or you happen to stumble upon an idea, you can properly nurture it into existence. I define fertile ground as you being a cultured, well-informed person. You read books and blogs, both fiction and nonfiction; you talk to smart, creative people frequently; and youâre generally a curious and optimistic person.â
âAcknowledge that the world can be incredibly unintuitive. So many businesses exist today that wouldâve been considered unthinkable, even insane by people living a few centuries ago. Roblox, Uber, Twilio, iPhones ⌠it takes an incredible amount of foresight to acknowledge the value of an idea before it gets traction. Thatâs because ideas, i.e., what works and what doesnât, are incredibly unintuitive.â
As an aside: he used to share all of his metrics publicly but the page seems broken right now, unfortunately.
đ˘Â Shoutouts
My friend Ryan Doyle currently offers custom sales advice for just $19. Heâs the smartest sales guy I know and I keep telling him to raise his prices but he wonât listen. (His cold email course is also amazing. Iâm seeing some incredible results applying what I learned from him.)
No-Code Exits by Katt Risen is a super inspiring newsletter that shares stories of how no-code makers went from 0 to acquired.
Daniel K. Hunter just relaunched the Indie Thinkers newsletter which supplements his search engine. Content discovery is a huge problem and I love Danielâs approach.
Highrise â Free marketing news and actionable strategies, right in your inbox every week.
End Note
As always, if youâre enjoying this report, Iâd love it if you shared it with a friend or two. You can send them here to sign up.
And whenever you're ready, here are 2 ways I can help you:
If you want to brainstorm ideas with me, need some honest feedback, or have specific questions about newsletter growth, web scraping, or indie making you can book a 1:1 session here.
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Have a great week,
Jakob
PS: If youâre interested in sponsoring this newsletter, you can find all relevant information here.
Loved your note on "Cute Startups". My son has been going on and on about "no-code" apps and businesses and believes that is the wave of the future. HOWEVER, we both had the same concern about all the weak and half-baked apps that will flood the market in the next few years.
Then we'll need an app to cull through all the bad apps to find the couple of gems. Thanks!