Designjoy of Canva, password manager for seniors, Future of SaaS in the wild world of AI, ...
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!
💡 Opportunities
“Business idea: “The Designjoy of Canva” - Lower priced subscription for unlimited design requests designed in Canva - Focus around social graphics, email templates, blog graphics, and sales materials - 2 day avg. turn around time Constantly turning away clients who need this. “ - Brett @ Designjoy
“project idea for an indie hacker out there: chatgpt ui wrapper optimized for devs. could prob do a good bit here, bet a good builder could build this in a few days - correct syntax highlighting - let users specify which package versions they're using so they get relevant info back - pre-generated prompts to get better dev results - auto display generated html/css/js -etc etc” - Kenneth Cassel
“I’m desperate for recommendations for a password manager for Mac that is dead simple enough for a 93 year old to use. One Password and LastPass would not cut it in my opinion. Would be excellent if it could also be used on an iPhone.” - Sarah Doody
🛠 Things Worth Checking Out
GummySearch makes it easy to ideate & validate businesses with Reddit. Quickly find painful problems to solve and solutions people are asking to be built.
Caraway offers non-toxic, sustainably-designed kitchen essentials at 10% off exclusively for Business Brainstorms readers.
📈 Future of SaaS in the wild world of AI
Justin Mares shared a super interesting theory on the future of SaaS in his latest email.
A few years ago there was a ton of hype around direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands. Shopify, “arming the rebels”, you know that kind of stuff.
However since it was so easy to launch new brands the landscape quickly became incredibly competitive. As a result DTC brands were far less promising businesses than they initially seemed.
Now with the advent of all these new AI tools something similar is about to happen to SaaS businesses.
Just as there was a flood of DTC brands after infrastructure companies like Shopify made it super simple to launch one, there will be a food of software products as a result of Chat-GPT and Co.
So the SaaS world is about the enter hard times, just like the DTC world did.
The big winners, just as it was the case for DTC brands, will be (1) infrastructure platforms and (2) companies that own distribution.
🧙 Framework
The Framework: Understand what your big customers are required to have and provide it to them, even though it's boring and expensive to do.
Example: “Red Hat takes Linux and certifies it against all kinds of government, safety, privacy etc standardards, such as PCI and FIPS and numerous local ones. As a result if you are a government or many large companies you simply cannot download Linux and YOLO it. You are legally required to use the certified software so you take the path of least resistance and buy RHEL. That's it.” - Source
💸 Revenue Signals
Projection Lab is now at $8.5k/mo. (“Simulate your financial future and chart a course toward your best life.”)
Scanii is generating $35k/mo. (“Identify unsafe content in milliseconds.“)
prop_odds is almost at $2k/mo. (“an API offering live (and historical) sports betting odds from different sites).
Some more cool revenue signals and discussion here.
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
PS: I’ll be in Bangkok from April 21 to May 5. So if you’re in the area and want to meet up, shoot me a message!