This week’s Founder Finds includes:
✨ A Midjourney guide
🎮 A gamified productivity app
📸 An advanced graphic design tool
⌛ How to find time for side projects
💼 130+ boring businesses to invest in
🌀 How the flow state leads to happiness
🚀 A book about the struggles of founders
❓ 25 questions you should ask before starting
➡️ And more…
🪶 Remember This
You only ever grow as a human being if you’re outside your comfort zone
🤓 Fav Finds
Tools, tweets and more from Trends Pro Members
📸 Artboard Studio shared by Daniel Berggren
A graphic design tool with automation features
⌛ Finding the Time for Side Projects shared by Royce Johnson
A blog post on managing side projects with a busy schedule
🚀 Lost and Founder shared by Chuck Hardy
A book about the struggles of building a tech startup
📘 Read This
130+ Boring Businesses to Invest In
Here’s the formula for a boring business that you want to buy, build or invest in:
- Stale: No fancy CRM or automation.
- Old: Has been around for 5, 10, 15 years.
- Weak: Its competitors are “ok”, not “great”.
- Simple: Has a simple but needed business model.
Buy it, automate it and win over the competition.
🌟 Founder of the Week
“I’ve been reading Trends.vc for years. I recently joined Trends Pro and I like how supportive the community is. Everybody is there to help you grow as an entrepreneur.”
Tim is building Derby City Data which offers freelance data consulting for small businesses and nonprofits.
What’s your most important habit?
Telling myself each day something that I’m thankful for. Sometimes work and life can get really overwhelming. Reminding myself about the best things in my life helps to keep me sane and motivated.
What are you reading right now?
The Country of the Blind by Andrew Leland
My dad is legally blind and recently needed to start using a cane. I wanted to know how he might be feeling without being intrusive or offensive. I hope the book will give me more insight into how I can connect with him.
What product or service do you wish existed?
A tool that increases prices after a set time or X number of purchases.
What product are you obsessively using right now?
I use the iOS app Habitica to track and maintain my habits.
What are you bullish on?
Publishers with large historical or technical archives. Publishers can license their works to AI companies to train models that are better than what we have now.
ChatGPT was trained on Common Crawl data and still gives good results. Imagine AI trained on high-quality data from The New York Times articles, O’Reilly technical books or peer-reviewed magazines.
What’s your favorite Trends Report?
🦾 AI Agents
I’m a fan of delegating work to my AI assistants.
Exclusive Deal: Tim is offering Trends.vc readers free advice on how to model your data. Not sure how to structure your tables and link them together? Tim will help you out pro bono. First come, first serve. Contact Tim via email or message him on Trends.vc to claim.
💬 Join the Conversation
Here’s what Trends Pro Members are talking about…
- (📈 Pro) Productization courses
- (📈 Pro) Getting started with Figma
- (📈 Pro) The fastest path to product launch
❔ Ask Yourself
Here are 25 questions on your value proposition, user acquisition, conversion, delivery and operations.
Answer them before building a product:
- What’s your pricing strategy?
- How will you get your first 100 users?
- Why would people return to your product?
- What value will users get from your product?
- How will you balance building and marketing?
👀 Watch This
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi studies happiness. He says money doesn’t make us happy.
What makes us happy is the “flow” that boosts our well-being, productivity and creativity. It occurs when we get involved in challenging, but doable tasks.
🏆 Trends Pro Member Wins
🎨 Shuyen Phoon launched UI Design for No-Coders
✨ Vikash Kumar Prajapati made a Midjourney guide
❤️ Dale Williams built Heart of your Strategy
🎪 Chuck Hardy is building Habium in public
⚙️ Mehmet Gonullu hosted a masterclass on business efficiency
🇪🇸 Maciej Cupial was interviewed in Spanish
🫐 Uwe Dreissigacker went viral on Sri Lankan TikTok with InvoiceBerry
🧠 David Fu unlocked Trends.vc Masterminds by reaching a 30-day standup streak
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