Future, Growth, Audience, Niche, Scars
☕ Good Morning!
With all the changes taking place around us, none of us can truly say what will happen in the coming months and how this may impact our lives. In an interesting Sunday post, The Hustle speaks to the four prominent futurists Amy Webb, Bryan Alexander, Amy Zalman, and Jamie Metzl on their short and long-term views of the future. Key predictions include more localism, an increase in 3-D printing, acceleration in AI and biology as well as the growth of immersive platforms, especially for educational content. One result which is always true of catastrophes, is that they are a catalyst for change, let’s hope they are positive. Read the full post here.
🚀 Maker News
In his latest Trend Report on Growth Tools, Dru Riley points out that “companies must work harder and pay more to succeed in free and paid channels” and that “growth tools allow companies to escape the marketing rat race with assets such as quizzes, calculators, games, directories, aggregators, checklists, apps and more.” This is another excellent report and brilliant resource for all Makers looking for innovative growth ideas. As always, the report covers the key players, predictions, opportunities as well as a curation of links for further reading. You can read the report here and if you want more you can buy the Trend Pro Notes here.
🏗️ Build + Launch
Jens Lennartsson shares his framework on how you create a $49 product in 24 hours and then sell it on Gumroad. His key takeaway is to find a very specific problem in a very defined niche, but most of all you need to grow that audience which believes in your credibility and authority and will buy the product from you. Read his Twitter thread here and also check out Daniel Vassallo to learn more about building a twitter audience.
Following on from above, David Perell shares a thread on his current and future business model. As above he places great emphasis on Twitter to build his audience and the growth of his email subscribers, to whom he then pushes his media and courses to. This then grows his Twitter audience again, and that’s how his flywheel turns! Read the full thread here.
The Pomp shares a great quick read by CNBC on the growth of niche online brands. Especially specialty sellers are currently booming, such as online retailers of eyewear, wine, and pet products. Additionally, with many not taking summer holidays this year, there will be more disposable income for online shopping. Read the full article here.
🖥️ NoCode
Jose Bermejo shares his latest GrowthSeeker newsletter with us, in which he describes his five steps “from idea to no-code MVP test in 24 hours and 0$.” He summarises that if you have an idea to solve a problem and it’s easy and cheap to test a solution you can build an MVP and learn more about the problem and the solution while testing it on the market. At the same time, he rightly advises “to deepen in the problem research with in-person user interviews.” Read the full newsletter here.
💭 Afterthought
To finish off, @vijayshekhar shares a valuable video with us of non-other than Steve Jobs speaking at MIT. The key learning I take from his words is how critical it is to build “scar tissue”, by making decisions, owning their implementation, learning from the mistakes you make, and picking yourself up again to move onwards. The value this carries is immense and that’s why it’s so important to take action, build, and launch! You will never regret it. Watch the full video here.
