A Daily Curation of the Web's Best Content for Startups

Micro-Saas Business Opportunities

Micro-Saas Business Opportunities
Here are some interesting business ideas from the Digital Assets newsletter with some advice on how to implement them. This article is worth a read if you are struggling to find a good startup idea. 

Here are the ideas:

CRM for Freelancers
“Solution – Enter freelancer CRM to handle all of the sales and admin tasks that most freelancers don’t enjoy. Keep the functionality easy and simple. Functionality to filter on contacts, pipeline, and tasks. Integration with email marketing would be another great idea.”

KPI Tracker
“Link/KPI tracker. It will allow the user to create a link for a promotion and then track specifically how that link performed.”

Team Communication/Zaps
“Zoom is clearly the leader in online meetings and chatting, and now they just introduced Zaps. I think this can be huge going forward into 2020.”

Bookmarking Extensions (devs and designers)
“As a developer, I bookmark tabs all the time so I can reference back to them. It would be awesome to add some notes as I read, and have more of a better user experience than just a long list of bookmarks in Chrome.”

Content planner
“Solution – A simple, easy to use a content planner that multiple people can edit and view, and sends alerts to the people working on it when it starts to get close to the time it needs to be sent out and after it is sent out.”

There are some good ideas here that are worth exploring. 
 
digitalasset.substack.com

Go to Link

Sujan Patel of Mailshake

Sujan Patel of Mailshake
Another great example of the value of content marketing and growing an audience.

Sujan Patel, co-founder of Mailshake, talks about how they grew their blog to over 300k visitors a month through content marketing, the importance of building a personal brand, the value of launching on AppSumo, and more.

Sujan knew he wanted to build a SaaS app, but realized the value of building an audience first so he started blogging first. About a year later he wrote an ebook that ending up selling more than $342k through a lot of hard work and grew his newsletter subscribers to 35K.

That audience and AppSumo launches to build awareness were key factors to the early traction of Mailshake.
 
saasmarketer.io

Go to Link

The Passion Economy

The Passion Economy

Great essay on the growing passion economy, remote-first companies, using AI to augment our work, and more. It covers many of the themes I’ve been focusing on in this newsletter. There has never been a better time to start businesses around our creative passions.

Here are some highlights:

“People will need to learn to monetise their skills and create unconventional economic opportunities for themselves. Waiting for the economy to bounce back is not the smartest recruitment strategy in the COVID-19 era.”

“A key component of the passion economy is storytelling and Marte tells a gripping story through his business. It creates a strong bond between customers and instructors.”

“While the passion economy will be immensely rewarding for creators, it will not be all fun and games. People will need the discipline and the rigour to work hard, experiment fast and deliver consistently. Unlike regular employment, creators will need to figure out human resources, accounting and legal issues themselves.”

“Instead of debating whether artificial intelligence (AI) will exacerbate job losses in the COVID-19 era, we must figure out how it can augment the productivity of creators and micro-entrepreneurs who will be the pillars of economic rebuilding in the post-coronavirus world. We need to free up time for creators to do the work they truly care about and are good at. That is how the passion economy will blossom and lead to the next wave of economic growth.”

via Ollie Forsyth

Go to Link

How Jack Butcher Used Twitter to Generate $1m in 18 months

How Jack Butcher Used Twitter to Generate $1m in 18 months (From Scratch)
Interview with Jack Butcher of Visualize Value on the My First Million podcast.

“Jack Butcher talks about how he’s built up Visualize Value and “Build Once, Sell Twice”, where he’s productized his services. Sam and Jack talk about scaling to $1m in revenue in 18 months, plus other opportunities that Jack sees for content creators”

I love Jack’s brilliant idea of creating simple infographics to explain complex ideas. Check out his Twitter feed to see the images. He now has over 108k Twitter followers. That is up over 15k in just a few weeks. That is the power of a good idea!
 
play.acast.com

Go to Link

Product Hunt as am Acquisition Channel

Product Hunt as am Acquisition Channel
I’ve written before on how launching on Product Hunt can be a major boost for a startup.

It can also be an effective place to get the attention of journalists.

“Don’t dismiss Product Hunt if your target audience isn’t there. The platform can be a great way of getting press. Hello Weather ($4k/mo) is a weather-forecasting mobile app, and they’ve seen this firsthand:

To our surprise, the app received some attention on Product Hunt, and then got positive reviews in AppAdvice and Macworld. That sent some nice traffic spikes our way. We quickly amassed a few thousand downloads, which gave us a bit of motivation to continue working on it.”

Go to Link

Productized Services with WPTangerine

Productized Services with WPTangerine
Productized services are a great business model. Rather than always try to find new clients and doing custom consulting, productized services allow you to charge a monthly fee for relatively standardized services that are easily outsourced.

WPTangerine offers unlimited WordPress editing for a monthly fee. This is a great business idea and can be done in many niches.

You don’t always need to be unique or first. This is the same idea that Dan Norris of WP Curve started many years ago. The company was sold to GoDaddy.

Almost every type of consulting or agency work could shift to a productized service model.

Go to Link

Community-curated knowledge networks

Community-curated knowledge networks
“We are living through the emergence of a new business category that doesn’t even have a name yet, but which I believe will become an important part of our digital lives: online communities at the intersection of content curation and knowledge management. “

In our world of information overload, curation is becoming more critical to keep up with and succeed in fast-changing business environments. I started this curated IdeaEconomy newsletter because I think it is critical for entrepreneurs to keep up with trends and skills to maximize their startups success.

There will be big opportunities in this space.

Go to Link

How Core Web Vitals Affect Google’s Algorithms

How Core Web Vitals Affect Google’s Algorithms
Google is planning a major update in May 2021. Here is a guide from Neil Patel on how to get ahead of those changes.

Neil explains Core Web Vitals like website’s page loading speed, responsiveness, and visual stability and how they could impact your rankings.

Go to Link

Joel Runyon – Balancing Multiple Businesses While Doing The Impossible

Joel Runyon – Balancing Multiple Businesses While Doing The Impossible
Here is a great interview with Joel Runyon of ImpossibleHQ. His story is a very expiring example of all the opportunities available to entrepreneurs now. He has bootstrapped multiple businesses, ran 7 ultramarathons on 7 continents to build 7 schools for PencilsofPromise, and he has a great brand with Impossible.

“Joel Runyon started Impossible in 2010 as a way to push his limits and do something impossible. He’s a driven and determined entrepreneur, blogger, and athlete, and his lifestyle challenges have allowed him to set records and give back by supporting charity.”

“While running his brand, he’s also running multiple other brands such as a meal plan company, a fitness app, a productivity app, as well as being an advisor to multiple other companies.”

There are so many great lessons here:

-Blogging and podcasting to build an audience and become well known.
-Doing interesting things like running ultramarathons around the world, raising money for charity, and doing cold shower therapy.
-Writing evergreen content to get found in search engines.
-Guest posting for early traction.
-The value of great branding with Impossible and the 777 project.
 
evergreenprofits.com

Go to Link