Helping dementia patients, Family Heirloom as a Service, Figma for architecture, asking for what you want, why you can't just hire smart people and get out of their way

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

• The CEO of Mercury Immad Akhund asked on Twitter: “Respond to this tweet with a startup idea. I will tell you whether I would take a investor meeting or not and why for that idea, assuming it came in from a strong warm intro.” Quite a few interesting ideas in the replies.

  • “Family Heirloom as a Service. Memories of loved ones captured using curated prompts + LLM to fill in the gaps/flesh out the story. Imagine reading a newsletter from your grandpa, where he tells you about his wild trip after graduating college”

  • “figma for architecture”

  • ”The next-generation financial platform for independent landlords. Rental property finances, all under one roof — from banking to rent collection, expense management, cash flow analytics and more.”

  • “Helping dementia patients and their caregivers extend their life at home with a smart environment patients and monitoring solutions for caregivers and clinicians. Most patients have to be moved to assisted living or caregivers need to leave their careers early.”

  • “Early, regular and affordable full body checkups focusing on preventive and proactive treatments resulting in reducing overall health costs for families and eliminating the late stage disease discovery and related pain. Essentially instead of paying hospitals for reactive and after disease treatment with hundreds of thousands of dollars, pay smaller amounts every quarter to prevent getting disease or start early treatment.”

🛠 Things Worth Checking Out

• High Signal. Pete Codes shares 8 indie startup news stories every week as well as one founder interview and one funny Tweet. Great way to keep up to date with bootstrapped startups without spending all day on Twitter.

• Trible offers a no-code platform that lets experts, coaches and content creators easily build their own branded websites and mobile apps to deliver and monetize courses, content, community memberships, and coaching services.

• Cleverly uses data from thousands of outbound B2B campaigns to send proven, personalized messages to your dream clients on LinkedIn — getting positive responses straight to your inbox.

Links in bold are ads. Book yours here.

🧪 You can literally just ask for what you want

• Was reminded by this tweet that everyone should as far more often for what they want.

• Didn’t like how much we’re paying for one software we’re using at our agency. So I asked for a discount. Didn’t give any reason why they should give us one. Just asked: “Hey, any chance we can get a discount?”.

• And just like that, we’re now saving 10% every month:

  

🧪 “Hire smart people and get out of their way” doesn’t work

• One of the big things I wish I had known earlier is that you can’t just hire a bunch of smart people, and then I sit back and wait for amazing things to happen.

• No one cares as much about your business as you do, so you have to be the one who relentlessly moves things forward every single day.

• To quote Frank Slootman in a recent podcast: “This is what naturally happens to human beings. It's innate. We slow down to a glacial pace unless there are people who are going to drive tempo and pace and intensity and urgency. That's what leaders need to do.”

• For example, instead of accepting “later”, “tomorrow”, or “next week”, you have to actively challenge people to “why not now?”. When you’re talking to team members, it has to be either yes, it’s a good idea or no it’s not. And if it’s a good idea, let’s do it right now.

End Note

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Have a great week,

Jakob