Business Brainstorms 💡- My favorite ideas of the week

#1 💡

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• The more competitive a market the more buying decisions boil down to vibes.

• For example, I recently started looking for an AI meeting note taking software we can use in our sales and clients calls. Fireflies, Fathom, MeetGeek, tl;dv… there are just so many of them and they all seem to have pretty much the exact same features. Pricing is also very similar. But they all have very distinctively different vibes. tl;dv feels a bit too indie for my taste. Fireflies too coorporate. Something felt off about MeetGeek. Like they were trying too hard and the website seemed a bit clunky. Fathom seemed like the best match purely on vibes.

• After realising this I had to rethink my agencies positioning. We’re in an incredibly saturated and competitive market. But in an effort to “professionalize” we had removed almost everything from our website and made it maximally clean. Now I put the vibe back in.

• So far it definitely looks like it working. Our calendar is packed. And people do tell me on calls “I get so many companies pitching the same thing but when I checked out your site I liked the vibe so I booked a call.”.

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#2 💡

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• Yes, please.

#3 💡

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• James Clear still sits at the top of bestseller lists with Atomic Habits. People clearly do love habits. Self-development by habits has long gone mainstream.

• So a playful single-purpose device that helps people build better habits, ideally with a social network built in, maybe some retro charm, would probably kill it.

#4 💡

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• I recently rediscovered the magical impact running has on my body. But that is hardly news.

• Dancing on the other hand seems like a massively underutilized tool for wellbeing.

• Most people never dance. Or when they do it’s only after consuming alcohol/drugs.

• Structured dances like Salsa have a high barrier of entry.

• Dance + sober + no barrier of entry = ecstatic dance (for example).

• Afaik no one has yet built a successful franchise alá Barry’s Bootcamp or Soul Cycle at this intersection.

#5 💡

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• Feature bloat also affects service businesses.

• We recently stopped doing two things for our clients that were costly and labor intensive (booking meetings for them + detailed weekly reports).

• No one complained.

• In fact, clients are happier because things are now more streamlined and they do get better results.

• A related more subtle type of bloat that tends to creep in is operational bloat.

• For example, we got rid of the daily huddle and literally nothing changed except that everyone got 15+ minutes of their time back.

• It’s worth Mario Kondoing all processes all features regularly.

End Note

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Have a great week,

Jakob