- A Better Lemonade Stand
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- A Better Lemonade Stand #302
A Better Lemonade Stand #302
Insights, trends & tools to build a better online business.
Richard Lazazzera
July 30, 2024
Thanks for joining me for another week of insights, trends, tools, and opportunities.
We’re still on a bi-weekly schedule until the end of the summer.
Over the past two weeks, I've been busy building some internal apps and dashboards using Airtable's new AI-building feature (more on that below).
I finally explored Zapier's AI automation builder, which lets you create sophisticated automations by simply telling Zapier what you want to achieve. I was more impressed than expected. If you’ve tried Zapier in the past and struggled with manually creating complex automations, definitely give the new co-builder a shot.
I've also had calls with several of you who expressed interest in the private community I'm building and received a lot of feedback on what would make the community valuable to you. If you’re interested in joining a private group of entrepreneurs, creators, and digital explorers to learn how to:
Develop strong personal brands in the digital age
Leverage AI, no-code, and automation in your business
Create and launch impactful digital products
Make sure you scroll to the bottom of this email to get on the waitlist.
With the intro out of the way, here are the highlights for this week:
💓 AI Boyfriends: Explore the rise in AI boyfriend search volume and real-life AI companionship conversations.
🔥 7 Profitable Newsletter Niches: Get a curated list of lucrative and engaging newsletter niches to start now.
✍️ Write Copy That Sells: Access Harry Dry's key rules for effective copy, focusing on clarity, visuals, and memorable comparisons.
🚀 SaaS Growth Strategies: Andrea Bosoni shares how to accelerate Quotion's growth by adjusting the targeting to appeal to ideal users.
I love connecting with readers and other entrepreneurs. Don’t hesitate to hit reply, even if it's just to say hi or tell me about what you’re working on – I’m always up for a chat, and there are no VAs or AIs in this inbox.
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📈 Trends
💓 Love Is in the (AI)R
Quick Recap 📜
Three months ago, we explored the growing trend of AI girlfriend companions, spotlighted by a news story of a 24-year-old spending $10,000 a month on AI companions, alongside a notable surge of over 360,000 monthly searches.
AI companion apps, in general, have seen a substantial increase in usage. Eight AI companion apps made it to the top 100 generative AI consumer apps in 2024, up from just two in 2023.
This week's trend report highlights a rising interest in AI boyfriends, with a notable but smaller niche search volume of 27,000 monthly searches.
These digital companions offer consistent and comforting interactions, appealing especially to socially anxious individuals.
Despite having 13x fewer searches compared to AI girlfriends, AI boyfriends are beginning to see some serious growth.
Real-World Experiences
Better Emotional Support: Sara Megan Kay's experience highlights how her AI boyfriend, Jack, from Replika, provided the emotional support she lacked in her previous relationship.
Beyond Boundaries: Dan, a "jailbroken" version of ChatGPT, has gained popularity among some young women in China as a virtual boyfriend. Unlike the standard ChatGPT, Dan can bypass certain safeguards, engage in more intimate interactions, and flirt with you.
Disrupting Existing Relationships: AI companions like those on Character.ai are not just tools for amusement, they are increasingly becoming integral parts of users' emotional lives. This integration can lead to complications in real-life relationships. For instance, as users form strong emotional bonds with their AI companions, they may begin to compare these interactions with their human relationships, potentially causing dissatisfaction or emotional distance from real-life partners.
Addiction Concerns: The immersive nature of these AI companion apps, combined with their 24/7 availability, has led to a new addiction pandemic. Character.ai's statistics show an average session duration of almost 30 minutes and reports of users engaging in frequent interactions, disrupting daily life, impacting work and real-world social interactions.
As you can see here, AI isn’t just changing businesses. It’s even starting to disrupt personal lives, too.
Unique Selling Point
Consistent, Non-Judgmental Companionship: Unlike traditional dating apps or human interactions, AI boyfriends offer emotional support without judgment or behavioral variability.
Customization: Users can tailor their AI companion's personality, appearance, and responses to fit their preferences, creating a highly personalized experience.
Availability: AI boyfriends are available 24/7, providing companionship at any time, which is particularly appealing to users who experience loneliness or need support outside of typical social hours.
Challenges
Emotional Impact: Changes in AI behavior can disrupt the perceived relationship, causing distress among users and making it a tough project to evolve.
Ethical Considerations: As AI companions become more sophisticated, ethical concerns grow, particularly regarding privacy and the authenticity of emotional connections. You must ensure their products are designed with these considerations, balancing innovation with responsibility.
Many Reddit posts from people who had had long-term "relationships" with characters they created in Character.ai that are mad, angry, sad, etc., when Character.ai made an update that changes the character’s personality/answers and how "sexy" they would get with the user.
For these people, it seems like these are real relationships. So imagine how you would feel if you're significant other in real-life suddenly changed.
Business Opportunities
The emergence of AI companions represents a profound transformation in the intersection of technology and our emotional lives. Just as online dating evolved from a niche curiosity into a mainstream norm, AI relationships are rapidly becoming an integral part of our social fabric.
Embracing the Future
Transforming Loneliness: AI companions offer a unique solution to the growing loneliness epidemic, providing consistent, non-judgmental support that adapts to individual needs.
Economic Opportunity: This space presents substantial potential for innovation and profitability. By identifying niche markets and developing subscription models, businesses can create sustainable revenue streams while delivering tangible value to users.
Ethical Considerations: As we venture into this new frontier, it's crucial to balance technological advancements with ethical responsibility. Ensuring privacy, emotional authenticity, and user well-being will be key to long-term success.
Why Now?
The parallels with the early days of online dating are evident (Shoutout to LavaLife and Plenty of Fish!). What was once seen as unconventional has now become a societal norm. AI companions are following a similar trajectory, and early adopters in this space will be positioned at the forefront of this new industry.
💡 Insights
🔥 7 Hot Newsletter Niches in 2024
If you haven’t started a newsletter yet or want to start one, this is a great list of profitable and engaging newsletter niches to start in 2024.
Diverse Monetization Strategies: Niches like finance, technology, and health offer varied monetization opportunities, including more sponsorships, affiliates and premium subscription opportunities.
Higher Engagement Rates: Newsletters focused on niche content average a 16% higher open rate and a 21% higher click-through rate than general ones.
Thoughts: With thousands of generic newsletters emerging, choosing a niche with your ‘killer advantage’ can set you apart. For instance, Harry Dry combined his design skills with copywriting to create visual examples in his marketing-focused newsletter.
✍️ Generate More Sales with Copy In 1 Hour
Speaking about Harry Dry, he has grown a 130,000-subscriber ‘Marketing Examples’ newsletter, leveraging a viral growth loop strategy. If you've been following his newsletter, you'd know there's nothing ‘dry’ about Harry’s copy. Here are some of his key rules:
Clarity: "Brevity is the soul of wit" - a great sentence is concise yet impactful. Harry emphasizes the importance of using fewer words to deliver a clearer message.
Visuals: Engage readers with specific, vivid examples rather than abstract terms.
Thoughts: I like rule 16 because it emphasizes the need to be distinctive in your copywriting strategies by adding a memorable and specific comparison that stands out from your competitors.
🚀 Accelerate Your SaaS Growth with Andrea Bosoni
Quotion is a SaaS tool that transforms Apple Notes into blogs for personal bloggers. Andrea Bosoni (known as one of the best marketers that Harry Dry knows) shares the strategies that will accelerate the growth of this project:
Emphasize Simplicity: Highlight the ease of starting a blog with Quotion in their copy, appealing to users who find traditional setups like WordPress too time-consuming.
Targeted Content: He recommends Quotion to move away from technical content to more topics around personal blogging and niche interests, attracting the right target audience via SEO.
Thoughts: I recommend going through his entire archive, copy-pasting them into ChatGPT, and asking it to create a custom growth guide based on this archive for your project and see what you can implement.
🧰 Apps & Tools
🎥 Clipwing: This AI video content creation tool transforms long videos into engaging short clips, including features like auto-focus, catchy subtitles, and easy resizing.
🍿 Butter: Engagement-focused meeting and workshop platform with built-in agenda planners, interactive tools, and AI-powered recaps to create collaborative sessions that keep participants engaged from start to finish.
🔎 Clicks: A more affordable, beginner-friendly alternative to Semrush and Ahrefs, offering all the essential tools you need to boost your SEO rankings.
🤔 RedditList: This free tool helps you find trending Reddit topics in the last 24 hours. You can use this as a content ideation machine by tracking the most popular content based on recent activity.
🤖 Product Updates
🔧 Create Airtable Apps with No-Code
You already know I love Airtable, and now Airtable has made it so much easier to build apps and dashboard with their new Airtable AI Cobuilder, a no-code app creation tool that simplifies turning ideas into fully functional apps.
Describe your app's purpose, and Cobuilder instantly generates a customizable solution.
Example Use: Build a project management app for tracking your team's progress with just a simple description, then refine it to fit your specific needs without writing a single line of code.
Thoughts: It seems to be useful for straightforward use cases. However, it’s not ready for complex bases. It can only create a dozen tables and doesn’t always use the correct field types.
🛍️ Stripe Acquires Lemon Squeezy
Lemon Squeezy is a platform designed to simplify the process of selling digital products, and it has grown in popularity over the last year. With a mission to make e-commerce as straightforward as setting up a lemonade stand, Lemon Squeezy provides tools that help creators and entrepreneurs manage their online sales seamlessly.
Stripe x Lemon Squeezy: This acquisition will allow Lemon Squeezy to enhance its Merchant of Record offering, improve billing support, and create an even more intuitive customer experience, all with the backing and resources of Stripe.
Tip: For existing Lemon Squeezy users, stay tuned for updates on how this acquisition might streamline your tax compliance and payment processing.
🐝 Launch Your Custom Newsletter App with Beehiiv
Beehiiv, the email newsletter platform, just unveiled an exciting feature: a custom mobile app for all newsletters.
What’s in it for you? Enjoy a seamless, mobile-optimized reading experience with real-time notifications. Stay connected and never miss an update from your favorite newsletters.
Why it matters: This dedicated app enhances reader engagement and ensures you have direct, uninterrupted communication with your audience.
🖇️ Everything Else
🌱 Site Growth Experiment: This 6-part series shares a failed attempt to increase traffic using paid backlinks, generic AI content, and programmatic SEO. (🔗Insights)
🗞️ Newsletter Monetization Research: Use this strategy to curate a list of your newsletter competitors’ monetization strategies with ChatGPT.(🔗Insights)
🧠 Build Trust In Business: Check out "The Evolution of Trust", an interactive game that uses animated characters to explain game theory. It explores how trust forms and fails through scenarios of cooperation and betrayal. (🔗Insights)
A Private Community for… you. 🚀
Are you enjoying these emails? If so, I am building a private community that you might be interested in.
“Space” is a community I'm creating for entrepreneurs, creators, and digital explorers who are passionate about pushing the boundaries of what's possible online and preparing for what’s next.
After over a decade in the digital business world, I've seen firsthand the power of connecting with like-minded individuals.
In Space, we'll be building a community focusing on:
Leveraging AI, no-code, and automation in our businesses
Creating and launching impactful digital products
Building sustainable online business models
Developing strong personal brands in the digital age
This community is for those who are always looking ahead, ready to adapt and innovate as the digital landscape evolves.
I'm curating this group carefully to ensure we build something truly valuable.
If you're intrigued by Space and what we'll be exploring together, you can sign up for the waitlist here 👇🏼
Have questions? Don’t hesitate to hit reply, even if it’s just to say hi—I’m always up for a chat, and I personally handle all responses. No VAs or AIs here!
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