A Better Lemonade Stand #294

 📈 Trends

🎯 Leverage Reddit for Insights Over Google Search

With the rise of keyword-focused fluff content dominating search results for the goal of ranking their business, many users are turning to Reddit for genuine insights from conversations and posts from firsthand experiences.

Why Reddit?

• Insights: Many users add "Reddit" to their Google searches to find more authentic discussions. This was noted in various analyses, including a Fast Company report. Niche Subreddits like r/DataIsBeautiful give us specialized content that often includes expert opinions and peer-reviewed information.​

• Popularity: Reddit usage is high among young adults (18-29-year-olds), who make up 44% of the different age groups, making it an appealing platform for the future.

• Engagement: ​Users spend an average of 8 minutes per visit, which indicates deep engagement with content that is often missing from traditional search engine results.

Tools Enhancing Reddit Research:

Reddit research tools are gaining extreme popularity recently, to name a few:

• Giga Brain: This tool gives you real-world answers based on curating and summarizing Reddit discussions, although it still lacks what I am looking for as it doesn’t deliver results around more long-tail keywords. However, it provides a comprehensive summary of relevant sources when it does work.

• IndiePulse: One of my favorite tools to find new Project Ideas based on your niche based on live discussions on Reddit.

• Gummysearch and F5bot: These tools help you navigate Reddit more efficiently by providing keyword notifications and extracting valuable insights for your businesses.

OpenAI and Reddit Partnership:

• Enhanced Content Access: OpenAI's latest partnership with Reddit will leverage Reddit’s Data API, supporting this trend of helping you train and find valuable responses from Reddit.

Solve a Common Pain Point:

If you have experienced Reddit in the past, you may find that a significant pain point is all the hateful feedback (it can get bad). On an anonymous platform, it's common to encounter a mob mentality with unconstructive comments.

However, the 10% of valuable comments and posts provide insights you don’t want to miss. This presents an excellent opportunity to introduce a Giga brain competitor that filters out the noise and highlights only the relevant and insightful Reddit comments around specific topics.

 💡 Insights

🚀 How Nico Sold an AI Project for $65K in 3 Months

Nico Jeannen shares how he created an AI startup in just 48 hours and sold it for $65,000 3 months later.

• Leveraging APIs: Nico utilized pre-made AI models through APIs to generate logos from text descriptions, allowing him to focus on other crucial aspects of his startup.

• Rapid Prototyping: Nico used Typeform to create a UI and collect payments, bypassing the need to code everything from scratch. This approach allowed him to quickly validate his idea and automate generating and delivering logos in 48 hours.

• Thoughts: Use no-code and low-code tools to rapidly get your ideas into a working prototype by leveraging existing tools and focusing on validation and user experience.

🔗 Watch Nico Jeannen’s Story Here

🛑 Why Vanessa Lau Quit Her 7-Figure Creator Business

Vanessa Lau, a successful online entrepreneur, shares why she decided to leave her thriving 7-figure creator business despite its success.

• Pressure and Burnout: Vanessa explains how the rapid growth of her business led to immense pressure and burnout. Managing a large team and constantly scaling up resulted in losing touch with her original passion and well-being. This is a common problem with founders, as The Hustle’s survey showed that 63% of entrepreneurs have dealt with burnout due to the stress of managing their business.

• Identity and Authenticity: She discusses her identity crisis as she tried to meet external expectations and replicate others' successes. This ultimately made her feel disconnected from her own business.

• Thoughts: Prioritize mental health and stay true to your original goal. Don’t leave a 9-to-5 and fall into a 9-to-12 trap.

🔗 Watch Vanessa Lau’s Full Story Here

📚 How Pat Walls Built Starter Story to $6 Million ARR

I’ve followed Pat for years, and right from the beginning, it was clear he would do something impressive.

Starter Story is on track to make over $6M/year by documenting interesting entrepreneurs' in-depth journeys.

Key strategies include:

• Lean SEO & Unique Content: Pat uses a unique "Lean SEO" strategy, focusing on releasing quick content before seeing results and scaling it. This approach helps him create content without risking too much time and resources.

• Experimentation: A/B testing and constant website tweaks, such as adding a static table of contents to his blog posts, have helped Pat double his site time and increase conversion rates.

• Thoughts: I've been following Pat since the early days. It's impressive how he leveraged automation to conduct numerous interviews and distribute content efficiently. Seeing Starter Story reach $6 million in ARR is truly remarkable.

🔗 Read More About Pat’s Growth Strategy

📰 Key Takeaways From the Newsletter Conference 2024

Newsletter experts gathered at The Newsletter Conference 2024 on May 3rd to discuss the evolving landscape of newsletters.

• Content Mastery: Experts emphasized creating habit-forming content with a clear value proposition to captivate audiences.

• Growth & Monetization: They covered best practices for using paid ads, referrals, and maximizing subscriber lifetime value.

• Thoughts: There is no denying that building a direct relationship with your subscribers is vital to a healthy subscriber base. For example, Vox’s newsletter subscribers spend 110 seconds on-site compared to just 40 seconds for Facebook visitors.

🔗 Get Insights From the Conference

📃 25 Rules for Building a Banger Newsletter

Inbox Collective shares some key rules to keep bookmarked while creating your newsletter. This was also mentioned in the newsletter conference above.

• Audience Ownership: Treat the inbox as the reader's space, and try to earn your spot with every email.

• Launch Quickly, Improve Constantly: Get your newsletter out fast and refine it based on readers' feedback.

• Thoughts: Another rule I would add to the list is optimization for mobile design. Over 70% of mobile email users delete poorly formatted emails within three seconds.

🔗 Get All 25 Rules Here

🧰 Apps & Tools

⚡ Zapier Central: AI Agents with Zapier connected access to thousands of other apps. Check out #291 and #292 if you want to learn more about how to build your automation skills with this tool.

✨ Glitter AI: Glitter AI lets you make step-by-step guides quickly by speaking, making it easy to document complex tasks for your business assets.

🎨 EverArt: Leverage AI to turn your ideas into unique art pieces that you can use for advertisements, social media posts, and email campaigns.

💐 Flourish: Use this to create polished and interactive data visualizations, making presenting complex data in a digestible format in your blog posts more accessible.

🏷️ For Sale

🐕 This Newsletter Is a Dog Store’s Dream Acquisition

Dog.News is a newsletter that gives you dog facts, memes, and news. It has over 13,732+ subscribers and is currently up for sale. If you like pups, this one is for you 👇

Stats:

• Asking Price: $12,595

• Open Rate: 24.6%

• Click Rate: 3%

• Frequency: 2-3x sends per week

• Subscribers per Month: 3,000

Highlights:

• 3 months of content already planned and ready to go.

• Get Loom videos for training and a weekly call for the first month.

Thoughts:

If you own a pet store in the US, this newsletter list could be a great way to tap into online growth and get more sales from your store.

🔗 Inquiry About Dog.News Here

📖 Events

🖥️ Build Better Interfaces with Airtable

Upgrade your app-building skills in Airtable by following this build-along style webinar.

What You'll Learn:

• How to share the right parts of your app with the right people.

• Enhance your interfaces beyond the basics.

• Utilize the latest built-in AI capabilities.

Date and Time: Today, from 10:00 am to 11:00 am PT.

Who Should Attend: Ideal for advanced Airtable users looking to refine their app development expertise with the new Airtable features.

🔗 Watch the Webinar Here

🤖 Product Updates

🤝 OpenAI and Reddit Partner Up

OpenAI and Reddit have announced a new partnership to enhance ChatGPT's capabilities and introduce new AI features to Reddit.

• Content Access: OpenAI will leverage Reddit’s Data API to turn Reddit’s rich source of knowledge into real-time responses.

• AI-Powered Features: Reddit will use OpenAI’s AI models to introduce improved features for users and moderators.

• Thoughts: Think about all the valuable content on Reddit from real people. This links back to the opportunity I spoke about for creating a Reddit feedback filter.

🔗 Learn More About the Partnership

🗣️ ElevenLabs Launches Audio Native

This is an embeddable human-like narration that you can easily generate and embed into the top of your blog posts.

• Setup: Log in to ElevenLabs, add your website domain, choose a voice, customize the player, and embed the code on your site.

• Availability: It looks like this feature requires you to upgrade to the Creator plan for $11/mo.

• Thoughts: We are listening more than ever before, data shows that listeners often stay engaged for around 3 minutes and 45 seconds per session, much longer than the average time spent on a page without audio.

🔗 Head Over to Customize Your Player

🖇️ Everything Else

📹 Learn Video Editing in 2 Weeks

Nico Jeannen shares how he split the learning process into technical and creative parts when creating his video. He spent 15 hours per day (don’t do this) for 2 weeks working on the video, longer than it took to make the product he sold. (🔗Link)

💼 JobBoardSearch Hits $40K Revenue Milestone

Rodrigo JobBoardSearch, a simple job board directory, surpassed $40K in revenue, built with basic tech and only $100 monthly costs. He shares a couple of insights into what inspired his growth. (🔗 Link)

🔎 Greg Isenberg's Insights on SEO 2.0

Greg gives us his take on SEO 2.0, such as creating valuable side tools for backlinks and the 80/20 rule, where AI handles bulk tasks while humans refine to avoid penalties. (🔗 Link)

👉 Choosing the Right AI Platform

Get full clarity on using the right AI for specific tasks. For example, GPT-4 for its versatility and features like Code Interpreter, Claude 3 for content creation, and Gemini Advanced for explanations and multimodal capabilities. (🔗 Link)