Autocomplete as an API, dog pregnancy tests, and making products more fun

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

• Pain Point: “All the major newsletter platforms which offer paid subscriptions (Substack, Ghost, ConvertKit, beehiiv, Buttondown) only support Stripe. There's (literally) a whole world out there who can't use these platforms. A huge opportunity.” - Twitter

• Idea: “Commercial Google's spell-checker, grammar checker, and Gmail autocomplete as an API.”- Twitter

• Pain Point: “While I love the Stripe customer/billing portal, we are starting to get to its limits. I think we will move away from it. Here's what we can't do with it: frictionless upsell, change payment methods, frictionless change of billing cycle” - Twitter

• Pain Point: “Toggles - the most overpriced item in the @bubble plugin marketplace?” - Twitter

• Pain Point: “Medicine has become a three-way negotiation between you, your doctor, and The Algorithm. This characterization makes it sound like a good thing. In reality, the doctor’s responsibility is being pushed to the patient because they are overbooked in the name of economic efficiency. As a patient with complex, non-specific medical condition, I can tell you how miserable this is. I can’t count on doctors at all to move the process forward. It’s always me, reading articles on PubMed and coming up with ideas. I’m not medically trained nor am I scientist. It’s a lot of legwork for me normally, but the ways that being sick limits me make it much harder. Further, the emotional and intellectual overhead required to negotiate with medical professionals is high. Back when I could afford to, I saw a neurologist at an office that didn’t accept insurance. She choose to see fewer patients and give them more time, as well as spend time doing research to look for new clues and ideas. This worked really well and I made progress with her. The rest of the American medical system? Gatekeepers that block access to potential treatment pathways until you can convince them it’s worth a try.” - Hacker News

• Pain Point: “Dear Substack, Your embedded form sucks big time. Can you guys just give us a newsletter id so we can create tue forms ourselves instead of a crappy iframe? Is 2022...wake up, you had this issue back in 2020 too...” - Twitter

🤖 AI Idea of the Week

• The Idea: Senior Citizens and Fitness

• The Pain Points: As people age, they lose strength, flexibility, mobility, and the ability to process oxygen. These are the primary reasons that seniors are more likely to break a bone and/or fall, which are two of the leading causes of death among seniors.

• The Opportunity: Someone should create a company that makes exercise equipment for seniors. The equipment should be affordable and easy to use for seniors. The equipment should be made adjustable so it can be used for multiple purposes and multiple body types. The company should also create a mobile app that helps seniors track their progress.

📈 Trend Signals of the Week

A fractional CTO is a Chief Technical Officer who is hired on a part-time or as-needed basis. This type of CTO is often hired by startups or small businesses who cannot afford to hire a full-time CTO. A fractional CTO can help with various tasks such as developing a technical strategy, assessing new technologies, and leading a team of engineers.

All kinds of fractional roles are exploding in interest right now. Another example would be “fractional marketing director”, for example.

A dog pregnancy test is a test that is used to detect dog pregnancy. The test is usually done by taking a blood sample from the dog and then testing the sample to see if the dog is pregnant.

/r/foraging is a community dedicated to helping people find, identify, harvest and cook wild edible food.

👨‍🎓 Framework of the Week

• The Framework: Take advantage of expiring patents.

• Explanation: Hundreds of patents expire every day and with a bit of research huge opportunities can be found. For example, the one click checkout goldrush was caused by the fact that Amazon’s patent one click checkouts expired. Here’s a cool site you can use as a starting point for your research.

💭 Prompt of the Week

• Prompt: How could you take an everyday product or service and make it more fun?

• Example: Take a walking tour and make it more fun by adding a scavenger hunt for those on the tour.

💸 Revenue Signals of the Week

brought to you by Revenue Watcher

• Indie Worldwide reaches $500 MRR. (“Building a startup is more fun with friends.”)

• Feather.so crossed $550 MRR. (“Notion to Blog in minutes”)

• Check my Presets now makes $1.3k/month. (“Make money by selling your Lightroom presets.”)

• Productive Recruit grows to $2k monthly revenue. (“The all-in-one college

  sports recruiting platform.”)

• Stagetimer just reached $2k MRR. (“Remote-controlled Countdown Timer.”)

• Valheim Server Hosting is now at $8k MRR. (“We know you're excited to get started with Valheim, so we made it easy. Create a server within 5 minutes.”)

• Contentbot.ai celebrates $10k MRR. (“The world's most advanced AI Writer.”)

📚 Business Read of the Week

The 100 Rules for Being an Entrepreneur by James Altucher is still a fantastic read full of unconventional advice even though it was published 10 years ago.

A few paragraphs I highlighted:

• “Entrepreneurship is a sentence of failures punctuated by brief success.”

• “If you are offering a service, call it a product.” 👈 This is one of the most important lessons I learned in my entrepreneurial journey so far. In the beginning, I tried to build fully automated tools. Now I’m starting to sell the “product” when it’s really just 80% automated and I’m handling the remaining 20% manually. Automating the remaining 20% would take so much time and introduce a ton of complexity. For the customer it largely makes no difference, I’m able to catch all bugs produced by the code by hand and I’m able to iterate much faster.

• “To sell your company, start getting in front of your acquirers a year in advance. Send them monthly updates describing your progress. Then, when they need a company like yours, your company is the first one that comes to mind.” 👈 This is one of the hidden benefits of building in public.

• Always think first, “What’s going to make my customer happy? EVEN if that means introduce them to a competitor. If you are the SOURCE, then everybody comes back to the source.” 👈 Did this a few times and never regretted it.

• “On any demo or delivery, do one extra surprise thing that was not expected. Always add bells and whistles that the customer didn’t pay for.” 👈 I keep forgetting this even though it’s such a no-brainer.

• “Pick a random customer. Find five ideas for them that have nothing to do with your business. Call them and say, “I’ve been thinking about you. Have you tried this?” 👈 Love this.

End Note

As always, if you’re enjoying this report, I’d love it if you shared it with a friend or two. You can send them here to sign up. 

And should you come across any interesting businesses, trends, or ideas this week, send them my way!

Have a great week,

Jakob