Curing imposter syndrome, reliable boring businesses, unfair advantages, ...

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.

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• Immediately get better looking and tell funnier jokes (probably)

💡 Opportunities

• “Two weeks ago I hired a landscaper to revamp my front porch area. 1 day of work for $2,800. He never showed up. I have similar stories with surveyors, wetland engineers, septic guys, and even a lawyer. Some even did ~90% of the work and never invoiced me. What’s going on?” - Twitter

  • A few interesting comments:

    • “My experience with home contractors is that there are two kinds: 1) the kind who are completely unorganized 2) the kind who you can't afford”

    • “My dad started a handyman service after he retired. One of his biggest selling points is "We'll actually show up when we say we will." Apparently, this is a bigger problem than I realized.”

    • “Brother, the stories I could tell you from 13 years in the trenches with a web design business. Good 60% of my clients tracked me down because their previous designer disappeared into thin air.”

  • An Uber-like service for handymen and contractors is an idea I’ve writen about before, but this thread is a great reminder that there is a lot demand.

  • The discussion here is also a great reminder that there’s lots of opportunities if you’re willing do start a boring business. As long as you do solid work and show up when you say you will, you’re miles ahead of most of the competition.

• “Software engineer got tired of getting rejected by automated screeners and tested a theory. Real resume: 0% success. Obviously fake resume stuffed with buzzwords: 90% success rate- Calls from from Notion, AirBnB, Reddit, Dropbox, Robinhood, etc” - Twitter

  • Big corporations are implementing algorithmic pre-screening for more and more roles.

  • So an AI-tool that automatically enhances resumes by adding relevant buzzwords could be an interesting opportunity.

📈 Trend Signals

• Whether you like it or not, a big reason why conversational podcasts are so popular right now is that they replace for many people the feeling of hanging out with friends.

• The Impaulsive podcast by influencer/Youtuber Logan Paul is just one extremely popular example.

• This post has some really interesting insights on why conversational podcasts win against narrative ones.

• Twitch has announced that it is implementing a number of restrictions to the Twitch Gambling category on its live-streaming platform.

• Demand for this kind of content will not simply go away and someone else will happily pick it up.

👨‍🎓 Framework

• The Framework: Unfair Advantages.

• Explanation: Instead of worrying about how unfair the world is, you’re better off focusing on your own unfair advantages and coming up with a plan to add more to your repertoire. Paying close attention to your own unfair advantages is a great strategy if you’re struggling to decide what project to pursue.

• Examples: If you’re starting a health-related startup it definitely helps if you have lots of doctors among your friends, even if you know little about medicine yourself. A 20 year-old founder without kids can leverage his naivety and freedom to take on market risks, while for older founders opportunities with execution risk but little market risks are often better suited. Similarly, if you have millions in your personal bank account you can afford to play very different games than someone with zero dollars to their name.

• Read more: here.

🧙‍♂️Take my advice 

• “If you haven't offended someone by noon each day, then you aren't marketing hard enough." - Dan Kennedy

  • By now everyone knows you won’t magically become an expert after 10,000 hours. If you do the same comfortable thing over and over again, you won’t improve much, no matter how long you keep going.

  • The same is true in any area of your life or business where you want to make progress.

  • So paying close attention to anti-signals is a powerful strategy to check if you’re pushing hard enough.

  • If you’re not failing often enough, you’re not taking on enough risks.

  • And, as Dan Kennedy notes, if not at least a few people are offended by your marketing efforts, you’re definitely not doing enough of it.

💭 Prompt

• The Prompt: What’s something you wish was easier or better? Could you work on that?

• Example: Podcast discovery is still a largely unsolved problem. Here’s one discovery tool that I personally would love to use:

  • Show a list of hot topics like “Elon Twitter”, “Nordstream sabotage”, or “Germany energy crisis”. Then show all podcast episodes where they talk about it. Sort the list by how popular the show is an how long they talk about the topic.

  • This is not a million dollar idea but would be a fun weekend project and easy to monetize using ads.

• Here’s how I’d build it:

  • Use Spacy to extract topics from an aggregator like Biztoc.

  • Possibly enrich terms using Google Trends data to check what’s trending.

  • Then download podcast episodes and turn them into text using Whisper.

  • Maybe simply start with the Top 100 podcasts in the “Business” category or some other niche to keep things simple.

  • Use a standard full-text search algorithm to find out which podcast episode transcripts are the best match for each trending topic.

  • Then publish a daily or weekly list of trending topics + related podcast episodes.

💸 Revenue Signals

• Co-Space is now making over £121k in MRR. (“Beautiful, design-led private offices, dedicated desks, hot desks and meeting rooms matched with exceptional benefits.“)

• Data Importer is now at $5.7k MRR. (“Reliable data pipelines for Salesforce”)

• Reels Templates is at $1.5k MRR just 9 weeks after the launch. (“Reels Templates is an app which provides the most trendy reels templates in one place and updates them every week”)

• Pika has crossed $750 in MRR. (“Give your boring screenshots a great outfit using Pika.“)

📚 Read this: Elon Musk’s texts

• Elon Musk is currently in litigation with Twitter. As part of the discovery process related to this lawsuit, the court has released hundreds of text messages and emails sent to and from Musk: Elon Musk's Texts.

• Best comment: “These should be packaged into a book and distributed as a treatment for imposter syndrome.”

• There’s lots of gold in Elon Musk’s texts if you read the raw source and avoid snarky comments by journalists.

• I wrote a bit more about it here.

📢 Shoutouts

• Trendline is true hidden gem of a newsletter. Each issue is packed with interesting business trends and surprising trend charts.

• Learn to no-code and bring your idea to life in 30 days with the support of an engaged group of like-minded peers and no-code experts. Next bootcamp starts November 7th.

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 from last week

  • “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

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