Spicy gums, hunting the unlock, scuba diving, a $6k/mo bank statement converter, ...

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.

💡 Opportunities

• “Ever since he’s been using the spiciest sauce he found on the internet to go from shutdown to activated and it works miracles. […] My friend swears by it, when he is shutdown at a social event he takes the sauce.” - Twitter

  • Product idea: make consuming spicy sauce more convenient, for example, by putting it into chewing gum.

  • Related comment: “We’re seriously considering starting a tiny chewing gum company around this where the gum has two components: One to shoot you into sympathetic and one to calm you into ventral. Slingshot gum. All coming with some Nervous System info!! 10% chance we’ll actually do this but the idea is nice.” - Twitter

• “Idea for a product I would pay for. Track my YouTube and podcast listening. Using @OpenAI's Whisper, transcribe everything into an indexed database. Let me do smart searches. Ex: "The My First Million episode that mentioned Chamath"“ - Dharmesh Shah

• “The only viable in-email ad network (LiveIntent) is OK, but the RPMs are just not impressive. If anybody ever figures out a way to bring sponsors and email lists together in a scaleable way, it's probably a billion-dollar business.” - Scott DeLong

  • Note: RPM stands for “ad revenue per thousand impressions”.

• “Someone should launch a Twitter ads only agency ASAP … huge opportunity” - Marketing Max

  • Note: It seems quite likely that targeting on Twitter will be fixed soon so that ads finally will become usable for most companies. So now seems like a great time to start positioning yourself in the space.

🛠 Things Worth Checking Out:

• My friend Charlotte Grysolle spent this year doing a "Year of Creative Experiments. I’m a huge fan of this “small-experiments-spread-over one-year” approach and think her final creative experiment is a brilliant idea:
  
  She’s doing a free workshop to inspire others to try a year of creative experiments of their own. You can find all details and sing up here.

• I just got access to this new note-taking app called Tana. I’ve played around with it for a week now and I’m 100% sold. It really feels like what Roam always should have been. It’s super easy to add structured data to tags (e.g. add a due date to todos, assign them to projects etc.) and embed all notes that fit certain criteria into any page. Everything is incredibly flexible so you can build workflows that 100% fit your needs. Unfortunately, the project is currently still invite-only (and I don’t have any invite codes). I waited a few weeks before getting invited.

📈 Trend Signal

• “The global recreational scuba diving equipment market size was valued at $1.95 billion in 2019 and is forecasted to reach this level again in 2023, post-pandemic recession.” - Source

• Scuba diving apps are an important use case for the Apple Watch, yet most apps offered by manufacturers seem to care little about their customers needs. Could be an interesting niche to look into if you know how to develop apps.

👨‍🎓 Framework: Hunt the unlock

• Explanation: One thing to always keep in mind when it comes to real-world games like business is that no one knows for sure what’s going to work.
  
  You have to keep coming up with new ideas, test them, don’t get discouraged by failures, and keep going until you find the one thing that finally unlocks the next level.
  
  Startups only fail if the founders either run out of ideas or out of energy to keep acting on them.

• Examples: It took Mailchimp 5 years of chasing after silver bullets, always thinking: “This is going to be the unlock. And it wasn’t the unlock. Let’s launch this feature. This is going to be the unlock. And it wasn’t the unlock. Let’s do this PR, this is going to be the unlock. Never.”.
  
  The one little change that finally led to explosive growth was the introduction of a freemium model. Within one year after introducing it, they more than 10xed their user base. And it kept doubling in the years after that thanks to their freemium model. This is what allowed the founders to sell the business for $12B to Intuit.

💸 Revenue Signals

• Copy.ai just hit $1m MRR. (“Experience the full power of an AI content generator that delivers premium results in seconds.”)

• Online-Solitaire.com is generating $10k/m.

• This bank statement converter is generating $6k/m.

• Lots of additional interesting data points in this Hacker News thread.

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

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