Copycat alerts, narrative air covers, Salesforce consulting, ...

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 and discover better opportunities.

Let's dive into today's ideas, trends, and opportunities.

👀 Imperfect Action Podcast

Bite-sized actionable tips and strategies to build a business that brings you more profit, more freedom and even more joy.

💡 Opportunities

• Scrape/Copycat alerts as a service. Generate code snippets and tiny images people can include on their websites. Then whenever the same snippet or image is detected on another website, they get an alert that their site has been copied. Upsell services to help them take copycats down.

  • Inspired by this tweet.

• “I think male friendship is a huge market opportunity Apathy, lack of relational skills, and lack of self confidence are biggest issues.” - Stephen Olmon

  • Most guys never learn to socialize sober. So the combination of many people deciding to quit drinking alcohol and more and more things moving online leads to major problems.

📈 Trend Signals

• A Salesforce consultant helps organizations with the planning, implementation, and management of Salesforce applications.

• “You can teach yourself the basics through Udemy. etc. For <$1,000, and a certification is $200-500. Many mid-range experts are making $125-150/hr online once they're certified. High end is >$300/hr.” - Chris Bakke

• ClickUp is a project and knowledge management tool that helps teams stay organized and on track. Friends keep telling me it’s a superior alternative to Notion.

• Might be a good time to research what templates/products/services exist around Notion and brainstorm if something similar can be offered for ClickUp.

📚 Read this:

• The 1000 Day Rule: What Living the Dream Really Looks Like (an old post by Dan Andrews, one of the Tropical MBA guys).

• If you haven’t read it yet, you definitely should. And if you read it a long time ago, this is your sign to read it again.

• The main message: it roughly takes 1000 days to make the whole online entrepreneurship work.

• This is hard to believe when you’re just starting out since online entrepreneurship is so deceptively simple. It takes less than 5 minutes to put a buy button on the internet. But figuring out ways to make people see it, click it, enter their credit card information, and provide so much value that they keep coming back is a very different story.

• The different stages people go through during the 1000 days Andrew describes need some minor updates after 11 years. But despite all technological advances, the general pattern hasn’t changed.

• No matter what the gurus promise you, entrepreneurship is not easy. Unless you’re willing to suck at it for around 1000 days, it’s probably better to not even start.

• And most importantly, if you started less than 1000 days ago and still feel like you’re not going anywhere, rest assured that this is perfectly normal.

👨‍🎓 Framework

• The Framework: Prepare a narrative air cover.

• Explanation: As an indie online entrepreneur/creator/maker, it will most likely take you a long time to develop a stable, real sense of how you’re making money or even WTF you’re doing. Having a narrative air cover can really help you get through this period.

• Tom Critchlow defines it as “some kind of project, website, initiative that you can lean on during the early days of figuring out indie life.” He outlines three rules:

  • “It must be completely within your control.”

  • “Preferably non revenue generating. So people can’t measure its success (or failure) easily.”

  • “Make it something that makes you more interesting, open doors and starts conversations.”

• Examples: Tom Critchlow’s narrative air cover was that he was “building an art collective”, Fiercely Curious.

🧙‍♂️Take my advice 

Dan Gudema is the founder of SEO Turbo Booster. Here, he tells us how he spotted a gap in the market and shares advice for founders just starting out.

How did you spot the gap in the market for SEO Turbo Booster?

Our story is not traditional or planned. I had built the SEO and all the tech for pre-dating.com, a successful dating event company and I had just worked as a marketing director at a big supplement co. I was sitting at a Starbucks and someone looked over my shoulder and asked what I was doing with this dating site. I explained we auto-generate a page per city and keywords for SEO. He ran GypsyNurse.com and he hired us to write the same solution for that business. Around the same time the supplement company OceanBlueOmega.com where I use to work called and wanted the same. We were in business with an SEO Automation company. 4 years later we sell the same thing!

If you could start all over again, what would you do differently?

Instead of bootstrapping we should have focused on raising capital. We still have not automated everything yet and it kept us from scaling the business.

What trend or opportunity would you take advantage of if you were not too busy building SEO Turbo Booster?

I am obsessed with IOT devices and the growth of devices connected to the cloud, but I can’t focus on that market at this time. One reason I love this market is unlike software, hardware is hard to remove, or be replaced by lower-cost software, at least easily replaced.

💭 Prompt

• The Prompt: What’s the worst thing you pay for?

• Example: For me it’s currently definitely Instantly. It’s really buggy and makes it very difficult to stay on top of things. But all alternatives are just as bad and a lot more expensive.

💸 Revenue Signals

• Jenni.ai just crossed $30k MRR. (“Supercharge your writing with the most advanced autocomplete.”)

• Glowless generated $28k from a single TikTok video. (“Glowless is a powerful, transparent Asian Glow patch that puts an end to virtually all side effects by targeting the root cause.“)

• Interior.ai is now at $3k MRR just 11 days after the launch. (“Interior design and virtual staging by AI.“)

• TheSample.ai generates around $3k/month. (“We curate articles from hundreds of blogs and newsletters and send you the ones that match your interests.“)

• The "Question Generation using Natural Language Processing" course crossed $7500 in total revenue. (“Auto generate assessments in edtech like MCQs, True/False, Fill-in-the-blanks etc using state-of-the-art NLP techniques”)

  📢 Shoutouts

• Fellow indie maker Dan Kulkov writes a fun newsletter full of actionable tips for busy indie entrepreneurs who want to grow faster.

• Life-Changing Concepts newsletter makes you more successful in life with mental models and actionable ideas. Get a summary of 20 useful mental models when you join. It’s free.

• Through the Noise. Cut through the noise in startups and venture capital each week, read by 11,800+ creators, entrepreneurs and investors.

• AWS Fundamentals is a book that teaches AWS for the real world, not for certifications.

• No-Code Shots. Weekly updates, features, and news from the world of No-code.

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 whenever you're ready, here’s one specific way I can help you:

• If you want to brainstorm ideas with me, need some honest feedback, or have specific questions about newsletter growth, web scraping, or indie making you can get 1:1 help here.

• The feedback so far has been incredible. My favorite comments:

  • “Thank you so much, it made so much sense and unlocked a lot of things in my brain.”

  • “It was $29 but easily hundreds of dollars worth of value.”

Have a great week,

Jakob

PS: Wanna partner with me? If you are interested in reaching my audience, click here.