Copilot for cooperations, futility of SOPs, $0->$100m->$0 in 5 years, and adjusting to market sophistication through specialization.

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!

💡 Opportunities

• “Is there a Superhuman for Salesforce? Because this interface... kill me” - Austin Allred

• “Copilot for cooperations. How do you double the value of cloud storage? Add AI summarization of PDFs, thereby allowing businesses to replace millions in legal bills with thousands in SaaS fees. It’d be like Github Copilot, but for corporations. As context, every founder and investor has at least one huge directory of PDFs. Your corporate bylaws, your employment agreements, your investment docs — this folder is essentially a database of contracts. But right now, this crucial database can only be read one file at a time, and often only by a legal expert. Yeah, you can do keyword search, but that’s not quite the same thing as comprehending a 200 page PDF summarizing an acquisition. So what people do today is: pay expensive lawyers to ask questions about the docs. This is the most expensive search engine in the world, often costing hundreds of dollars per query, and taking hours if not days between each query. But now there’s an alternative. OpenAI has added several AI PDF readers as plugins to GPT4. And while they’re early and finicky and often can’t read many PDFs due to OCR and other issues, they are amazing when they work.” - Balaji Srinivasan

🛠 Things Worth Checking Out

• GummySearch makes customer research via Reddit easy. Discover problems to solve, sentiment on current solutions, and people who want to buy your product.

• Had a great chat with fellow agency owner Andy Walker. We talked about: when VSLs actually matter, strategic partnerships when launching an agency, adjusting to market sophistication through specialization. Listen here.

(all things above written in bold are sponsored ads, get yours here)

👨‍🎓 Founder Tweets

Source

• Walking is such an underappreciated hack if you want to get some serious thinking done.

• Aristotle knew it, Travis Kalanick knows it, and most people of course know it too. But hardly anyone is serious about taking advantage of it.

Source

• This 100% matches my experience at our agency.

• We tried to do the whole SOP thing prematurely because everyone told us that’s what you have to do. Turned out to be a complete waste of time.

• SOPs only make sense once you have a well-established business.

• In the early days everything is changing all the time and maintaining your SOPs is more work than just explaining things to people directly.

  

• Most tools (especially AI tools) are really just a distraction.

• As always, there are no real shortcuts.

• For example, when it comes to writing copy 99% of the work is understanding your customers. What do they care about? What phrases are resonating with them?

• The reason why most AI copy sucks is that people do not put in the necessary work to get these insights in the first place. If you feed AI with the insights gathered from hours of hard work, the results are actually decent.

🧪Founder Story

• A Reddit user posted a great story on how he went from $0->$100m->$0 in 5 years.

• “I was told to hire a lot of people. Put fuel on the fire they said. Bring industry experts who can move the needle. All this BS you hear all day. All failed. I hired VPs and bloated my payroll. Ultimately I ended up with a bunch of highly paid employees who don’t know how to do anything but to “build and lead amazing teams.” Imagine you hire someone to scale an area and their solution is to divide that area into 5 sub areas and hire someone for each of them to figure it out, etc. that’s their solution.”

• "I ended up focusing my efforts on hiring and ramping up those VPs and dealing with their dumb ideas instead of focusing on my 3 core tenants: build, sell, and deliver."

• Great HN comment:
  
  ”The solutions presented great.

  The made sense.

  They smelled good.

  They made great leadership stories.

  ...but none of it actually mattered to the customer.”

• Very easy to get distracted by the dozens of things people tell you to focus on instead of just the boring fundamentals: build, sell, and deliver.

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.

Have a great week,

Jakob