Newsletter checks, yacht weddings, nervous system dysregulation, ...

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.

😲 Black Friday Sale: Robomotion

Ever wish you could just create a robot for all your boring, repetitive work tasks, like collecting and entering data? (Yes, please.)

Check out Robomotion. It’s a robotic process automation tool that can streamline web and desktop applications to totally transform your workflow.

They’re currently running a Black Friday sale on AppSumo:

(It’s a discount on top of the already discounted price!)

💡 Opportunities

• “Anyone know a good AI for summarizing conversations? I’ve tried a couple summarizers and they get confused” - Swizec Teller

  • Interesting related approach Daniel Gross is experimenting with: “a GPT-3 summarizer that reads websites just like humans do. It scrolls pages and reads in visible text in chunks, which it then attempts to summarize.”

• “just sent an email to thousands of people w/ no link on the button.” - John Shahawy

  • I saw several tweets like this recently. An interesting opportunity could be to create a frictionless way to let people check their emails before they get sent out.

  • Buy a domain like checkmymail.com or something along these lines. Let people buy credits. Offer different kinds of checks: basic (layout + links) for 1 credit, full (layout, links, grammar, …) for 3 credits. Then people can have their emails checked by emailing the draft to, for example, basic@checkmymail.com. Ideally, people get a reply within a few minutes that either says “Looks good!” or lists all problems.

• “Expired domain development opportunity: YachtWeddings.com. A lot of folks wanna get married on a yacht. idea: create marketplace directory of yacht wedding locations. Charge for premium listing. Auction ends in 3 days” - Peter Askew

• “Free startup idea: Coffee Shop for Work Database Thousands of coffee shops rated on metrics that matter most for solopreneurs, freelancers, etc: wifi strength, bathroom cleanliness, coffee quality, noise, patron type (entrepreneurs vs. artists, etc), outlet abundance” - Alex Lieberman

  • existing solution attempts: LaptopFriendly, Cofipass, and CafeAtlas.

🚀 Domain Development Opportunities

Just like regular people browse properties on Zillow, imagining the life they would live in different mansions, entrepreneurs browse domain auctions, imagining the businesses they could build. Or at least everyone who read Peter Askew’s amazing playbook does.

• YachtWeddings.com - auction ends at 11/30/2022 6:42 PM (CET).

  • “A lot of folks wanna get married on a yacht. Idea: create marketplace directory of yacht wedding locations. Charge for premium listing.” - h/t Peter Askew

• QuantTrading.com - auction ends at 12/6/2022 9:21 PM (CET)

  • Lots of people are interested in quantitative trading methods or want to get a job at a quant trading firm. Provide educational material to attract traffic. Add a job board. Profit.

• FreshHoney.com - auction ends at 12/7/2022 7:52 PM (CET)

  • Partner with local suppliers and start selling the freshest honey. (Definitely read Peter Askew’s onion playbook first.)

• A few other interesting soon-ending auctions: NaturalPetFoods.com, OnCallDoctor.com, TechnicalIllustrator.com, BicycleBaskets.com, SurvivalTechniques.com, SpaBar.com, SmileKit.com, CustomFaceMask.com, SlowLiving.com, CatParty.com, BabyParties.com.

Reminder: domain squatting is 👎 domain development is 🔥

📈 Trend Signal

• I came across an interesting thread on Twitter interesting that argues that an overlooked factor in why it’s hard to make friends as an adult is nervous system dysregulation.

• “a nervous system in chronic states of threat downregulates opportunities to socially engage”

• Whether or not you buy into that theory, there’s definitely an exploding interest in learning more about nervous system dysregulation and how to fix it.

🗯 Prompt

• “What if trying to grow a brand on Twitter, TikTok, etc. to support your work is just distracting you from doing that work better? What if an audience is a consequence of, but not a contributor to, doing great work? What if it actually makes the work worse?” - Nat Eliason

🧙‍♂️Earned Insights

Vikas Nair is the co-founder of Openlayer, a model evaluation platform that makes it easy for ML teams to find failures and biases in their models, figure out their root causes, and use better data to fix them.

What’s something you didn’t pay enough attention to or ignored early on, then had to learn the hard way?

When we first started our company, we spent many months building product alongside a handful of design partners we recruited early on. This was incredibly useful to get a product out the door quick that solved a real problem for a handful of users. It also helped us get interest from investors early to get the funding we needed to stay alive and recruit help, if needed. The problem with this approach was that these partners were too few numbered, and too large to iterate with us quickly enough (these are all enterprise companies in the Fortune 500).

We were able to convert one of these into a paying customer, but it resulted in a long period of time where we were developing product without much consistent guidance (and overfitting the feature set to a narrow group of users). We’ve since been working with a community of 50+ data scientists and ML engineers who are passionate about our product and who can provide extensive feedback in quick iteration cycles.

Early user testing and UX research has led us to a more comprehensive, well-designed product, but the importance of it we certainly learned the hard way. 

💸 Revenue Signals

• Monos generated $4M in sales just on Black Friday. (“The Apple of suitcases”)

• Outway Socks sold over $30k in custom socks in a single day with no Black Friday offer.

• PageFactory broke $1k MRR.

📢 Shoutouts

• TRUST-able. Become the trusted advisor in your market niche. Actionable insights for indie entrepreneurs on creating value and building relationships.

• Life-Changing Concepts newsletter makes you more successful in life with mental models and actionable ideas. Get a summary of 20 useful mental models when you join. It’s free.

• Growth Unhinged by Kyle Poyar explores the playbooks behind the fastest growing startups — like Airtable, Webflow, Snyk, Jasper, and Hotjar. Expect deep dive case studies and guides into pricing, product-led growth, sales, and anything else that helps you grow faster.

End Note

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Have a great week,

Jakob

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