Non Sleep Deep Rest, Camping Coworking, The Black Box, ...

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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But getting a newsletter off the ground is far from easy.

This is why I started interviewing successful newsletter owners to understand how they grow, monetize, and operate their newsletters. And I’m sharing everything I learn in, of course, a weekly newsletter. It’s completely free and each issue is packed with actionable insights.

💡 Social Listening

• “There really needs to be a book for technical SaaS founders on marketing tech infrastructure to have early on: Setup analytics & funnel tracking. Financial metrics (& SaaS billing code). Referral sources & segmenting. Sync user data to ESP/CRM. Using onboarding survey data.” - Twitter

• “Even on vacation, I had to work 1-2 hours a day. Sometimes more. It's quite tricky to work from a caravan - internet sucks, electricity limitations, not a comfy place to work, crying baby (in my case). I was searching, with no success, for ANY place where I could have a deep work session for at least 4 hours. For sure, there is not a massive market for campsites with an onsite coworking space but I believe that 1 or 2 in each country would simply crush it!” - Peter Fabor’s newsletter

📈 Trend Signals of the Week

• Celeb professor of neurobiology and podcaster Andrew Huberman says that 10-30min daily of Non Sleep Deep Rest is one of only three non-negotiable protocols for him. (The other two are 10-20 minutes of sunlight each morning and 45-60min cardio or weight train.)

• Non-sleep deep rest is an umbrella term for practices that people use to direct their minds into a state of calm and focus.

• There’s currently not much competition of you want to rank for related terms on Google. And while search volume isn’t that high yet, it’s definitely growing fast right.

• “Everyone traveling with a camper in Europe uses an app called park4night. It's built by 3 young French indie developers and used by 6M(!) people.” - Peter Fabor

• The app is a kind of Airbnb for parking spots. You can find there places to park for free, as well as commercial campsites.

• It looks outdated and under-monetized. Could be an interesting opportunity to build something better or acquire the project.

👨‍🎓 Framework of the Week

• The Framework: The Black Box.

• Explanation: “Whenever I have a product or service idea, or someone brings one up, my first move is always to write a sales letter to one person trying to sell them the idea.

  I imagine myself standing in front of them with a big black box behind me and saying: “If you pay me $X, then there is something in this box that will create outcome Y.”

  WP Curve, for example, says “If you pay me $69 a month, I’ll fix all your WordPress website problems.” No one cared what was inside the black box (or that it changed over time) as long as the problem continued to be solved. I can try to sell that outcome to people even if the box is empty and save myself all the trouble of actually making whatever I think should go in the box. It also forces me to clarify the most important elements – exactly who the product/service is for and the benefits to that person so I know what I’m trying to achieve.” - Taylor Pearson

💭 Prompt of the Week

• Prompt: What market segments could be accessed by repackaging existing products or services so they are accessible to more people?

• Example: Take an API like SEMRush’s with an extremely high starting price and resell the credits in smaller chunks. Or consider Nature Box (acquired by HUNGRY). Their original business model was they’d buy snacks at Whole Foods, put them into different-sized packaging, and ship it to your house. That’s all the innovation they needed to get their business off the ground.

💸 Revenue Signals of the Week

• Inlytics is generating $7,212 MRR. (“linkedin analytics. optimize your content performance and grow your influence.“)

• ProductiveRecruit is generating $6,000/month. (“the all-in-one college recruiting toolkit“)

• Sheet.best is now generating $4,493/month. (“turn your google sheets, google drive or excel file into a rest api with sheet.best. access your spreadsheets data via a rest api and use it as a cms.“)

• Potion grows by +544.29% in the past 462 days is now at $4,510 MRR. (“create notion websites in minutes.“)

• Screenshot API is at $3,088 MRR. (“an api that allows you to take screenshots of websites“)

• Calendesk is at $3,025 MRR. (“your ultimate online booking system“)

• Page Factory hit over $500 MRR last month. (“harness the power of programmatic seo so you can spend less time creating content and more time making sales.“)

📚 Business Read of the Week

• Nat Eliason makes a compelling point that we should stop getting fooled by productivity porn. On the one hand, most people who write about productivity do not adhere to the prescriptions they shout into the void. And on the other hand, we should only use stories of others’ routines to sample for bits and pieces of what we may want to try.

• Eventually, everything has to find a structure that works for them and it’s very unlikely that it’ll match exactly someone else’s structure.

• My highlights:

  • “Michigan State’s campus was built without walking paths. Instead of trying to lay out the ideal network of sidewalks, the designers erected the main buildings, planted some grass, and let the students take it from there.”

  • “None of these [famous] creatives read a blog post on productivity and said “I must adopt a regimented schedule!” They more likely slid into routines that may or may not have been close to the ones portrayed based on their natural rhythms and desires.”

  • “To the extent stories of others’ routines are useful, it’s only to sample them for bits and pieces of what we may want to try applying to our own path. We should not expect to find the perfect answer to work and life in someone else’s structure. Rather, we should find a bit of stone, a bridge, or perhaps a nice planter, that we can borrow to see if it serves us or not.”

🤖 AI Idea of the Week

• The Idea: DTC Car Marketplace

• The Pain Points: When you’re buying a car, you have to go through a dealer, who then has to go through their parent company. Each of these companies take a cut of the car’s sale price, which means the car is going to be overpriced.

• The Opportunity: Build a website that allows the buyer to directly purchase the car from the manufacturer. The manufacturer will cut out the dealer and sell the car to the buyer for less, creating a win-win situation.

📢 Shoutouts

• My friend Andrew Kamphey has built the absolute best platform to learn how to use Google Sheets more effectively. If you’re using Google Sheets regularly, learning even just one or two tiny tricks can make a huge difference. And Andrew shares hundreds of them in his bite-sized lectures.

• Want to make money off short-term rentals? Find out where smart investors are buying up homes? Check out The Blueprint. Every Tuesday and Friday, James Harris and David Parnes take the most important stories in the industry and break down what they should mean to you. 

• I love the high-density insights Nat Friedman has on his website.