Wikipedia for careers, life coaches, ancient fish sauce,...

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!

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💡 Opportunities

• “Has anyone ever used a performance / life coach kind of person and had success? I feel like it’s mostly charlatans (people selling their time who haven’t done anything impressive) but I also see the need for something more forceful than traditional talk therapy.” - Andrew Wilkinson

  • Note: I’ve seen a lot of people looking for that kind of help but hardly anyone finding it. Maybe there’s now an opportunity to build a tech-enabled solution using Chat-GPT. Check out this thread for how this could work.

• “There should be something like a Wikipedia for careers: Lists of career paths, how & what skills you'll need to break-in & rise up, how much $ you’d earn over time, lifestyle/happiness pros&cons, recommended paths based on interests & skills & personality type, case studies etc” - Erik Torenberg

• When I visited Owltail, a website I occasionally use to find podcast episodes, I was confronted with a big banner that read “We’re selling this business!”. In addition, the footer on the site hasn’t been updated in two years. So it seems safe to assume that the owners didn’t find a way to turn the site into a thriving business.

  • There have been many attempts to solve the “podcast discovery problem” but it seems no one has figured it out, or a least found a way to properly monetize. Mike Rubini built and shut down Podda. Mub’s PodHunt seems abandoned.

  • At the very least this an interesting case to study. Why is “Podcast Discovery Is A Problem But It’s Not A Company”? And what other problems have similar characteristics?

  • But I’d also of course love if someone would finally figure out a good solution.

  • There are thousands of great podcast episodes that no one listens to simply because apps focus primarily on what’s new and it’s extremely difficult to find interesting older episodes of any given podcast. And the only way I currently discover new podcasts is through random Twitter recommendations and TikTok clips.

🛠 Things Worth Checking Out

• SaaS Origin Stories Podcast. Deep conversations with founders as they share how they started their SaaS journeys. You’ll hear firsthand the do’s and don’ts of building and growing a SaaS company and inspirational stories to fuel your own SaaS adventures. Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

• High Signal. Pete Codes shares 5 indie startup news stories every Friday as well as one podcast recommendation and one funny Tweet. It’s a great way to keep up to date with bootstrapped startups without spending all day on Twitter.

📈 Trend Signal

• Last week Amazon recommended a weird looking book for me to look at called “Nourishing Traditions”. It’s a cookbook, published in 1995, with more than 5000+ reviews on Amazon that “challenges politically correct nutrition and the diet dictocrats”. I didn’t buy or read it but thought it was pointing towards an interesting trend.

• Lots of health issues are on the rise. Testosterone levels are at an all-time low and the number of people struggling with food allergies is growing rapidly. Root issues are largely unknown and many people are confused and scared. But one reasonable assumption is that it has to do with the modern diet. So it’s hardly surprising that more and more people start looking at what people ate in the past.

• An interesting way to take advantage of this trend is by bringing back food products from the past. One example I recently bought myself is Garum. This fish sauce was standard ingredient in ancient Rome but only recently the recipe was rediscovered and the sauce is sold again. (It really does taste amazing.)

👨‍🎓 Framework

• The Framework: Turn internal tools into profitable products.

• Explanation: A great to find business opportunites is by looking at tools, scripts, templates, and APIs you built for internal use. If you’re getting value out of it, chances are high that people running a similar business will do too.

• Examples:

  • Asana started as a project management tool to improve internal team collaboration at Facebook.

  • Hootsuite was originally built by Invoke Media, a digital marketing agency, to manage its customer's social media accounts.

  • Intercom was first developed by the founders of Exceptional (now shut down) to communicate with their users.

  • Freshbooks was built by Mike McDerment to help him manage the invoicing and billing for his design firm.

End Note

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Have a great week,

Jakob

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