💡 Business Brainstorms 💡- My favorite ideas of the week

“There’s a way to do it better. Find it.”

Thomas Edison

💡Human QA

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• At least based on my experience this seems like a service a ton of companies desperately need.

• Automated checks are awesome, but they can never spot all the weird edge cases that a human can.

• For a shocking number of companies it’s painfully obvious that no human regularly checks if all the basic stuff works the way it’s intended to.

🐣 Typefully

• There are many reasons to use a social media platform like X/Twitter despite all the obvious downsides. A big one for me is to send little “virtual postcards” every now and then to remind people I still exist.

• But I don’t like opening X/Twitter as I get sucked into the feed too easily.

• That’s the main reason why I’m using Typefully. I can publish and schedule tweets without any distractions and zero risk of doom scrolling.

• In addition, it has many cool features like an AI writing assistant, actionable metrics, a nice native image editor, automatic retweets and automatic replies.

• You can try it for free here.

(Typefully sponsored this issue of Business Brainstorms but I’ve been a happy user for many months.)

💡Side Project Ideas

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• AI will revolutionise education. Textbooks are the lowest hanging fruit. Vector index existing textbooks, then mix and rewrite them in a way that takes the reader's personal preferences, conventions, and state of knowledge into account.

😈 Being Weird

“If you're small, you're in a position where it's to your advantage to be weird—you can have a point of view that the big tech companies never could. In the world of chairs—you're not going to build a cheaper chair than Ikea. Why not build something they couldn't—like a more interesting one?” - source

• One of the biggest mistakes founders make is trying to imitate “the big guys”.

• You’ll never beat the biggest companies in any industry by playing their game.

• The key is to realize that anything can be an advantage if framed correctly. Being big and famous is awesome but so is being small and unknown.

• On a related note, I really enjoyed this presentation by Maggie Appleton on Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers.

• “At the moment, we’re in the industrial, high-modernism age of software, where these standardized, one-size-fits-all apps are made for us by people who don’t know much about us.”

• AI will change this as more people will be able to create genuinly useful software for special use cases.

🫶 Things that do not scale

• Frank Lee put together this big list of things startups did that didn’t scale.

• It’s hard enough to find something that works. Adding “scalability” as an additional constraint is just stupid in many cases. Almost anything can scale if you throw enough money at it. But most of the time you’ll find out that what got you here won’t get you there anyway.

🚨 The marketing we need

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• Humans are mimetic creatures. We want what other people want. And it’s certainly not random why people want what they do.

• We’re all heavily influenced what we see in TV shows, hear in podcasts, see on YouTube. When a person we consider cool mentions that they find something cool, there’s a good chance we find it cool too.

• A great read on the topic on how we’re really influenced by marketing is Ads Don't Work That Way by Kevin Simler.

• Toy production firm Lego surveyed children between the ages of eight and 12 from the U.S., the U.K. and China. The number one answer when asked what they want to be when they grew up in the U.S. and the U.K. was YouTuber/Vlogger. In China the top answer was astronaut.

• There’s a discussion to be had about what this means on a societal level, but first and foremost, the responsibility lies at the individual level. No one forces you to consume certain content or use certain apps. You have a ton of power over what you want, what you find interesting, what goals you consider worthwhile, just by picking the right influences.

End Note

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

If your B2B business looking to systematize and scale your outbound efforts, my agency Sales.co might be able to help.

You can learn more about sponsoring Business Brainstorms here.

Have a great week,

Jakob