Recreating Dollar Shave Club, Superhuman for multiple inboxes, playing startup, saying no to good ideas, 5000+ local business trends
Recreating Dollar Shave Club, Superhuman for multiple inboxes, playing startup, saying no to good ideas, 5000+ local business trends
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.
💡 Opportunities
“Both parents work remotely and want to have a "digital nomad life" for a month or two... a massive market that nobody serves building apartments & coworking is easy-peasy, the hard part starts with school/daycare”- Peter Fabor
Two interesting projects in the space: Boundless Life and Traveling Villages.
“Unilever has ruined Dollar Shave Club (crap product now, crap service). Startup Idea: Recreate it from scratch.” - Michael Girdley
Useful related framework: “Recreate all the things we've loved that M&A and/or PE have destroyed.”
“Our company slack feels dead / no company culture / nobody knows each other when everyone is remote. Anyone got a tool they LOVE that's making their company feel alive/connected?” - Shaan Puri
“How has no one invented a web app that lets you manage multiple gmail accounts in a single tab, without having you link them through gmail? Like SuperHuman but can manage multiple inboxes at once... in my browser... UGH” - Marketing Max
If you know any such tool that makes it easy to share access across multiple people, please let me know!
“Klout - The startup that was too early but which I still think is a huge idea”. - Anand Sanwal
Klout was a social media analytics company that provided a Klout Score, which was a numerical value between 1 and 100 that represented a person's online social influence. It got acquired and shut down in 2018.
📈 Trend Signals
As already mentioned last week, I put all 5000+ business categories into Google Trends to see what kind of local businesses are taking off right now. Here are 4 more trends that caught my eye. Plus if you want to check out the complete database you can do so here.
People are becoming more conscious of the impact their consumption has on the environment.
The current economy has made people more conscious of their spending in general.
And people are beginning to see second-hand shops as a source for unique and interesting items, rather than just a place to find cheap goods.
Seems like there is some demand for local history museums right now. Might be an opportunity to launch non-boring/instagrammable ones.
At a cosplay cafe, customers can dress up in costumes and role-play as their favorite characters.
Escapism is definitely a big meta-trend right now.
Buy tents people can use at events. Rent them out. Profit. Seems like a solid boring business model.
👨🎓 Framework
The Framework: Don’t “play startup”. Build one.
Explanation:
“Focus on product market fit & only on product market fit. Until you have it. There are too many other temptations that feel like business building but are blackhole of time.” - Suleman Ali
“Find your one key metric (users or revenue) and push relentlessly after it.
All the other stuff is a little painful/messy to cleanup later…but if you focus on that stuff early on, there won’t BE a later.” - Shaan Puri
Examples: Don’t waste time creating a solid cap table, balance sheet, and p&l, talking to lawyers, recruiting advisors, company culture, etc.
🧙♂️Take my advice
Matt Warcholinski is the founder of Brainhub. Here he shares the three most important lessons he learned as an entrepreneur.
Execution > Skills - I am always amazed at how easy it is to learn new skills today ( thanks to the internet). I started blogging in English, even though I never was able to write (good) content + didn't have any copywriting / SEO skills + I am not a native English speaker. However, I spent a whole year writing and improving a bit each week. Nowadays, I see that everything can be learned, but you simply need to do it consistently
You don't have to be innovative - innovation is hard. Expensive, painful, and takes a lot of time to educate ppl. It's way easier to build something that people already need (but with a fresh new twist). You can build a CRM today and still be really successful by attracting a really narrow niche (Yoga studios?) or improving based on negative feedback on existing solutions
Learn to love the game - Despite of reading hundreds of business books, and listening to advise from mentors - you still need to make mistakes and experience challenge to grow as an entrepreneur. Most of the advice you understand after some years or after experiencing & solving a problem (not before). The most important is to go this way of building ventures and simply by executing & going this way - you will be successful. You need to 'love the game'.
💸 Revenue Signals
Right Message generated $55,697 last month. (“Beautiful, personalised surveys, quizzes, and opt-in forms.”)
PulseBanner generates $1,500/month and recently got acquired. (“Automatically sync your Twitter profile with your Twitch stream. Promote your stream like never before.”)
Yep.so just reached $500 MRR. (“Launch a landing page and start collecting signups in less time than it takes to design a pointless logo.”)
📚 Read this:
Focus Is Saying No To Good Ideas by Cedric Chin.
The title of this post is advice we’ve all heard at least a dozen times. After all, the saying is often attributed to Steve Jobs. But while it sounds obvious, most people don’t take it seriously.
What I love about Cedric’s post is that he’s focusing on specific examples from his own career. This helps a lot to see where you could and should say no to a good idea to focus on a great one instead.
📢 Shoutouts
Dan Hunter has started a new challenge. Build a newsletter from 0 to 10,000 subscribers in a year. You can follow his journey at HunterLabs.xyz. His goal is to help creators go from 0 to 1 by conducting experiments and iterating on wins and losses.
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End Note
I hope you enjoyed this report. If you have a minute, please respond and let me know what you think.
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Have a great week,
Jakob
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