TopGolf for X, evolution of entertainment, making $120k+ selling tooth powder, and more...

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.

💡 Social Listening

• “TopGolf for X is such an interesting business trend. Topgolf for minigolf, topgolf for pickleball, topgolf for mt biking, …” - Twitter

  • Note: Topgolf is a golf driving range game with electronically tracked golfballs and automatically scored drives.

• “I use TopTracker with one and Deel with the other. TopTracker is better, but neither of them are amazing. I wish there was a good paid solution for this or that freelancer payment platforms took this feature more seriously.” - Twitter

  • Note: TopTracker and Deel are time tracking platforms used by remote companies and freelancers.

• “I wish there was a crowd funding platform that focussed on paying dividends to investors rather than just being a stepping stone to a traditional round.” - Twitter

📈 Trend Signals of the Week

• Entertainment media is undergoing a fascinating evolution:

  • It started with newspapers and magazines.

  • Then attention turned to Facebook since it’s way more entertaining to see friends’ news than news news.

  • Next Instagram started taking over. “Friends” who spend all their time producing content (aka influencers) will unsurprisingly produce better content than your friends.

  • Then came TikTok. A giant talent show with an algorithm is more entertaining than individual influencers.

  • What’s next? One interesting idea is purely AI-generated content. Instead of just surfacing content based on your preferences using AI, why not also create content that is 100% tailor-made for you. Current tech is not there yet but it’s not hard to imagine that it will get there in a few years.

  • A fascinating intermediate step is virtual influencers like Rozy (130k+ followers on Instagram). Here’s a list of 35 verified virtual influencers.

• Online therapy platforms like Talkspace seem like a trend that is here to stay even post-Covid.

• I saw quite a few founders mention that they used online therapy in some form or another and benefited from it.

• Smartrr is a premium subscription app for Shopify retailers that promises to increase brand engagement and loyalty through rewards systems.

👨‍🎓 Framework of the Week

• The Framework: Brainstorm instances where there is an inherent, unresolved conflict between two things (X,Y). Then find ways to bring X into better harmony with the realities of Y.

• Explanation: What is X ? This is the thing that you are trying to make fit. This could be a belief, a behavior, a perception, a conceptual framework, a tool, a technology, a social institution, a relationship, or anything else. In most cases, X will be a set of behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs that you are trying to change. The next step is to figure out what is Y. Y is the thing that X is being brought into harmony with. Y might be reality, the present, the present moment, the present state of affairs, the status quo, what's true, the facts, or anything else. What is the nature of the relationship between X and Y?

• Examples: Find ways to bring our paleolithic bodies into better harmony with the realities of living a modern life. One specific example would be that primitive tribes consume a lot of dirt, while many people living a modern life have stomach problems. Hence an opportunity would be to help people living a modern life consume more "dirt" in a safe way. More examples:

  • Find ways to bring our passions into better harmony with the realities of living in a world of incentives.

  • Find ways to bring our intuitive brains into better harmony with the realities of living in a world of abstractions.

  • Find ways to bring our tribalist minds into better harmony with the realities of living in a global, information-filled society.

💭 Prompt of the Week

• Prompt: __ that you can __.

• Example: Food packaging you can eat.

💸 Revenue Signals of the Week

brought to you by Revenue Watcher

• Van Man makes $120k/month selling tooth powder. (“we have created a movement with an anti-big pharma message, using our knowledge of holistic health and inspired, soulful remedies that speak beyond the confines of analytics, studies, and science”.)

• Japan Dev generates $60k in a single month. (“Hand-picked software development & tech jobs in Japan.”)

• Josh Spector’s Skill Sessions generated $3,924 last month. (“One-hour video workshops featuring step-by-step systems you can use to accomplish your goals.”)

• URLR is now at $615 MRR. (“The link management platform to boost your marketing.“)

• Embed Notion now makes $500/month. (“A simple generator to create Notion embed snippets. Easily embed Notion on your website in seconds.”)

• Captime grows to $450 MRR. (“Offers all workout timers for CrossFit and high-intensity interval training workouts.”)

• Engagement Builder hits $100 MRR. (“Grow your Twitter audience in half the time with twice the result“)

📚 Business Read of the Week

• My friend Ayush just published an incredible profile on how the Tweet Hunter founders managed to grow it to $1M ARR in less than a year (a story I had some tiny guest appearance in).

• Loved his breakdown of the various growth strategies they tried. This is something I’m always taking notes on since you can never have too many growth experiment ideas.

📢 Shoutouts

• Cyber Patterns is a newsletter by Jason Levin that explores the internet's patterns every week. Sounds kind of abstract, but what this really means is that he applies his pattern-matching skills to uncover all kinds of interesting trends. His post on Digital Apprenticeships is a perfect example.

• Alex Brogan writes the Mental Models, Concepts, and Frameworks newsletter. His approach is to publish a ton of threads on Twitter and then to only include the ideas that resonated the most with people in the newsletter. Great strategy to ensure a high signal-to-noise ratio.

• Chris went from developer to building and running his own 7-figure dev agency (that was acquired last year). Now he’s teaching everything he learned along the way in his Dev to Agency newsletter.

🤖 AI Idea of the Week

• The Idea: Anonymizing Social Media + Email

• The Pain Points: Social media platforms and email services both have the challenge of implementing privacy controls that are clear and easy to use.

• The Opportunity: Building a service that makes it easy to restructure your social media and email accounts so that you can hide your real identity from companies and services (e.g. you want to sign up for another service, but not use your Facebook credentials, or you're applying for a job, but don't want to use your personal email)