Glassdoor for Online Lodging, Prompt Base, auctions for experiences, and pivoting your way to success
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.
Let's dive into today's ideas, trends, and opportunities.
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💡 Social Listening
“My sister works in recruitment and she says there is no decent NPS tool that integrates with their ATS (Jobadder, which has an open API). She's only found one tool so far and it's $800 a month, a bit too steep for small recruitment firms.” - Twitter
“There’s never been a better time to build the next big social app. We currently have a vacuum in what I call the “profile of record” - the app you use after you meet someone (or see them online!) to look them up. This used to be FB (RIP), and then it was IG. What’s next?” - Twitter
“Seems it is well past time for a 'Glassdoor for Online Lodging' to take it out-of-band for the online lodging apps.” - Hacker News
Note: There’s definitely also an opportunity for a new kind of hotel rating agency. Most of the factors people <35 value in hotels are not reflected in traditional hotel ratings. Finding great hotels is always a frustrating experience for my girlfriend and me.
The following list from Pieter Levels is a great starting point:
”fast check-in, door unlock w/ phone, modern interior, fast wifi, diff size pillows, bath, all-day breakfast, freshly ground coffee, gym w/ barbell, squat rack, heated pool + jacuzzi + sauna, blackout curtains/blinds, delivery to room, late checkout.”
“For years I've wanted a job board for sub $500m valuation startups that are growing quickly. This is a great way to for an employee to make lots of $$$... joining a safe-ish (well funded, revenue making) companies before that become unicorns. But..researching them takes forever.” - Twitter
“A B2B influencer management agency. So you reach out to these big guys on Twitter who have like a hundred, 200,000 followers and they're in B2B.
They have these audiences already.
You say, “Hey, I'll manage and get you more sponsorship deals and more speaking gigs and I'm also gonna go find like equity in cash flowing businesses where we can make rev share deals or profit share deals, and you can get pieces of these businesses and their cash flows in exchange for just promoting them.”
I'm gonna find like five or 10 of those businesses and I'm gonna put them in one cohort together with maybe one or two influencers and the influencers will tweet about the business and grow it. And then once a week, or once every other week, they'll all sit down and do like a cohort mentorship, group coaching kind of thing.” - Business Brainstorms Podcast
📈 Trend Signal of the Week
Prompt Base is a DALL·E, GPT-3, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion
prompt marketplace.What this means is that people can offer and buy short snippets like “gold monkey , god, rich, money, gold, daimond, silver, black background, ultra detailed, cinematic, photorealistic. 4K Surreal, surrealistic, hyper realistic, 8k, ultrarealistic, dslr, unreal engine 5, high res octane render, cinematic shot, cinematic lighting, photo realistic hyper realistic --uplight” that produce great looking images, for example, in a specific style. (Here’s a result you can get using this prompt from an alternative prompt site.)
It takes experience and lots of trial and error to write and optimize input text for generative AI models that reliably produce the desired result.
So it’s not at all unrealistic that prompt engineering will become an increasingly important job soon.
A floor desk is a type of desk that is designed to be used while sitting on the floor.
Floor desks are becoming increasingly popular as more people start to realize that sitting on the floor is a very natural thing and can help resolve tight hips and knee pain.
👨🎓 Framework of the Week
The Framework: Mind the beginner.
Explanation: Every year 140 million people turn 18 and want to pay for things. So there’s absolutely no need to always push for recurring revenue or “steal” customers from competitors.
And of course, keeping this in mind is also essential if you’re publishing any kind of content online. At any given time the number of beginners always outnumbers the number of people who will be annoyed by you talking or writing about “obvious” stuff.
💭 Prompt of the Week
The Prompt: What kinds of business can a company create by bundling a variety of products and services together?
Example: A bundle that includes a yearly membership to a gym, a monthly service that provides a personal trainer, and a subscription service that provides healthy food.
💸 Revenue Signals of the Week
Browserflow made $9,587 last month. (“automate your work on any website“)
Mailbluster is now making $5,292/month. (“super cost-effective email marketing software“)
Thread Creator grew by 83% last month and is now at $2,149 MRR. (“create and schedule twitter threads for free“)
Listenbox is now at $1,921/month. (“turn youtube into a podcast”)
Logology made $1,621 last month which is a 13% increase compared to last month but well below their best month ($5,027). (“get a designer-quality logo for your startup. in 5 minutes.”)
Pricewell is now making $310/month. (“effortless no-code pricing pages for your saas“)
📚 Business Read of the Week
I loved reading this thread on how Loom (now valued at >$1.5B) pivoted its way to success:
My highlights:
“I've become convinced that most founders place too much emphasis on finding the 'perfect' startup idea.”
“7 months in, we only made $600”
“It’s impossible to predict how things will go once you start—and it’s better to start and adapt than never launch because you’re worried something won’t work.”
🤖 AI Ideas of the Week
This week I used all companies that got accepted by Y-Combinator as input and let the AI model come up with new, similar ideas:
One Month: One Month is a project-based online learning website. We’ve had over 20,000 people sign up to learn new skills.
Sleep Engine: Sleep Engine is a curated marketplace for the best mattresses, bedding, and bed frames.
Kitch: We are a full-service meal delivery service that delivers pre-portioned, balanced meals that are designed by a registered dietician, to your doorstep.
Lett: Lett is a service that helps farmers to sell their produce directly to consumers. It offers a marketplace for farmers to list their products, as well as a delivery service to get the food to the customer's door.
I did the same for ideas discussed on the My First Million podcast:
A wellness retreat center for digital detox: A place where people can go to disconnect from technology and recharge in nature.
A pet sitting service that offers a la carte options: This would be a pet sitting service that offers à la carte options, so that pet owners can pick and choose which services they want and only pay for what they need.
Auctions for experiences: A platform that allows people to auction off once-in-a-lifetime experiences.
Genetic testing for athletes: Currently, there is no reliable way to test an athlete’s genes to see what type of sports they would be good at.
AI-assisted shopping: Create a personal shopping assistant that uses AI to learn about your preferences and make suggestions.
📢 Shoutouts
BrainPint - A curated weekly newsletter for the curious that includes interesting tools & resources to help you be more productive at work and grow in your career.
CategorySurfers.com. Discover the next unicorn SaaS idea before it explodes. Get a breakdown of growing software industries. For free. Join ex-Google, founders, and VCs.
Tweets on Demand. As another experiment, I’ve decided to productize the process I’m using to write tweets. It takes ~30 minutes to produce a month’s worth of tweets.
dofollow.io can boost your ranking with high-reputation backlinks from HubSpot, Zendesk, The Economist, Bloomberg & more.
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.
And should you come across any exciting businesses, trends, or ideas this week, send them my way!
Have a great week,
Jakob