“Once you stop learning, you start dying.” – Albert Einstein

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❓ What You’ll Learn

• How to build micro-courses with AI prompts?
• Who will offer micro-consulting services?
• How to build an email course?
• How to get quick insights into any topic?
• How to pick the right format?
• How to boost course completion rates?
• How to retain information better?
• What is the benefit of long books?
• Why should you be a painkiller?
• How to use micro-learning to teach complex topics?
• How to learn anything in the first 20 hours?
• What is the micro-education business model?
  
  

💎 Why It Matters

You can transform your life in hours instead of months.

🔍 Problem

You want to learn a new skill but lack time

💡 Solution

Micro-education helps you learn new skills fast.

🏁 Players

Micro-Education Examples

• Landing Page Hot Tips • Rob Hope teaches how to build effective landing pages
• The Collab Lab, Inc. • Maisha L. Cannon teaches AI-powered recruiting
• No-Code Maker Workbook • Katt Risen teaches how to build no-code products
• Innovisory Sessions • Jordan Divecha teaches creators how to build and launch businesses
• Hybrain.Academy • Nick McFly teaches AI for non-tech folks
• Growth Marketing 101 • Marketing Max teaches how to get more customers
• Find Your Following • Arvid Kahl teaches how to build an audience on Twitter
  

Micro-Education Tools

• Sequel • Add onboarding webinars to your website
• Zuddl • Run scalable webinars with polls, chats and more
• Mindsmith • Use AI to build detailed micro-courses
• Readwise • Highlight, save and manage notes from the web
• PDF.ai • Chat with your PDF documents
  
  

🔮 Predictions

• Personal AI assistants will help us make informed decisions. They will become our personal consultants.
  • Jarvis Invest helps you trade stocks.
  • FP Alpha gives insights into financial planning.
  • FinChat.io helps you get insights into 50,000+ public companies.
  • Wally helps you learn more about investing, finance and personal budgeting.

• More micro-learning platforms will use AI to build micro-courses. You will give the topic. They will build lessons and tests.
  • Mindsmith lets you use guide AI to build detailed micro-courses.
  • EdApp lets you build AI-powered micro-courses with a click of a button.
  • TalentCards lets you prompt a topic and watch AI build a micro-course from scratch.

• Full-time consultants will offer micro-consulting services. They will serve clients with lower budgets but urgent needs.
  • Harry Roberts offers web performance consulting and 90-minute calls.
  • Kevin C. Whelan offers long-term consulting services but has 90-minute strategy calls.
    
    

☁️ Opportunities

• Do micro-consulting. Share expert advice on short calls.
  • Rebecca Skeete helps with sales and marketing.
  • Vanessa Paech helps to build online communities.
  • Adrienne Kress helps with book writing and publishing.
  • Emma Rhoades helps to build workplaces with a great culture.
  • Vanessa Bolosier helps with branding, marketing and content creation.

• Build an email course. Stay top of mind by getting right in your students’ inbox.
  • Laurie Wang has a 7-day email course on social media marketing.
  • David de Céspedes has a 7-day email course on setting goals in Notion.
  • Josh Kubicki has a 6-day email course on managing finance in a law firm.

• Use ChatGPT to get quick insights into any topic.
  • Brian uses ChatGPT to learn JavaScript.
  • Brian Morris uses ChatGPT to learn history and literature.
  • ThuRein uses ChatGPT to learn React for iPad interfaces.
  • Ihtesham Haider uses ChatGPT to learn Japanese, Python and more.
    
    

🏔️ Risks

• Content-Format Fit • Micro-learning may have theory and tasks that barely touch the topic. It can be hard to teach backend development with a micro-course.
• Low Lifetime Value • This lowers margins and makes it harder to invest in customer acquisition.
  
  

🔑 Key Lessons

• Micro-learning accommodates shorter attention spans. Keeping lessons short and focused can boost the completion rate.
• Micro-education is great for upskilling. You can enhance your current skills with a few focused lessons.
• Spacing out topics over short lessons helps to retain information better.
  
  

🔥 Hot Takes

• There’s a benefit to long books. Especially if the ideas are repetitive. You spend more time with the ideas and soak in the lessons better.
• You need to pick an area that’s painful enough for people. Be a painkiller, not a vitamin.
• Micro-learning is bad for reskilling. You need more than a few micro-lessons to switch careers.
  
  

😠 Haters

“It’s hard to learn a new skill in N hours.”
It depends on what you want to learn. While it can be hard to learn data science in a few hours, you can learn how to do squats in a few minutes.

“A mobile format does not work for people who get easily distracted.”
It can be wise to take on a cohort-based course if you rely on external support and accountability to keep going.

“A 3-hour course is not a micro-course.”
Compared to what? There are 50-hour online courses, 30-day email courses and 6-month cohort-based courses. While you can finish a Duolingo lesson in a few minutes, not all topics can fit this format.

“Micro-courses seem like a bad fit for what I want to teach.”
The micro-learning format might not be a good fit for teaching complex topics. Focus on one goal at a time. This course tries to teach “everything” about SEO and lasts ~46 hours. This course teaches local SEO and lasts ~2.5 hours.

🔗 Links

1. Building a Report on Launching and Growing Micro-Education Businesses • The Tweet behind this report.
2. The First 20 Hours — How to Learn Anything • How to master practical knowledge and skills.
3. The Micro-Education Business Model • How to turn your knowledge into a micro-education business.
   
   

📁 Related Reports

• ​​​​​Email Courses • Deliver promised transformations in a scalable way
• Digital Products • Scale your revenue without spending more time
• Million-Dollar, One-Person Businesses • Find your highest point of leverage
• The Creator Economy • Create, share and monetize your content
• Micro-Consulting • Share short bursts of knowledge, perspective, insight and opinion
  
  

🙏 Thanks

Thanks to Meiko S. Patton, Alex Doda, Katt Risen, Uwe Dreissigacker, Simon Hell, Marcos Gorgojo, HJ Barraza, Maria Garcia Quintana, Errol Tiozon, Stewart Townsend, Bernardt J. Vogel and Eamonn Carey. We had a great time jamming on this report.

✏️ Emin researched and wrote this report. Dru researched and edited this report.

📈 What else?

Trends PRO #0124 — Micro-Education Businesses has more insights.

What you’ll get:

• 19 Micro-Education Examples (171% More)
• 14 Micro-Education Tools (180% More)
• 8 Predictions (167% More)
• 13 Opportunities (333% More)
• 4 Risks (100% More)
• 7 Key Lessons (133% More)
• 10 Hot Takes (233% More)
• 9 Links (200% More)

With Trends Pro you’ll learn:

• (📈 Pro) How will teachers spread knowledge beyond classrooms?
• (📈 Pro) Why will companies use micro-learning to train employees?
• (📈 Pro) Why do companies build learning academies?
• (📈 Pro) How to manage personal knowledge?
• (📈 Pro) How to share quick solutions to common problems?
• (📈 Pro) How to turn expertise into a short guide?
• (📈 Pro) How to boost engagement for your online course?
• (📈 Pro) How to boost customer success with onboarding?
• (📈 Pro) How to cater to visual learners?
• (📈 Pro) How to boost student success?
• (📈 Pro) How to stand out from competitors?
• (📈 Pro) What are micro-credentials?
• (📈 Pro) How to boost views on YouTube videos?
• (📈 Pro) How to take better notes?
• (📈 Pro) How to make educational micro-videos?
• (📈 Pro) How to use gamification?
• And much more…
  
  

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💲 100k+ Startup Discounts • Get access to $100k+ in startup discounts on AWS, Twilio, Webflow, ClickUp and more.

Brought to you by the team behind HeadsUp

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

Tim Jones

“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

25 Questions Before Starting

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

The Secret to Happiness

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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📈 100+ Trends Pro Reports • To make sense of new markets, ideas and business models, check out our research reports.

💬 1:1 Founder Intros • Make new friends, share lessons and find ways to help each other. Keep life interesting by meeting new founders each week.

🧍 Daily Standups • Stay productive and accountable with daily, async standups. Unlock access to 1:1 chats, masterminds and more by building standup streaks.

💲 100k+ Startup Discounts • Get access to $100k+ in startup discounts on AWS, Twilio, Webflow, ClickUp and more.

Brought to you by the team behind HeadsUp

“The greatest asset of a company is its people.” – Jorge Paulo

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❓ What You’ll Learn

• How to use AI to screen candidates?
• What are vertical hiring services?
• Why serve local businesses?
• How to find candidates with unique skills?
• How to attract more candidates?
• What’s the cost of a bad hire?
• How to find your niche?
• How to deal with a talent shortage?
• Why does employer brand matter?
• Who are informal recruiters?
• What is collaborative hiring?
• How to avoid being circumvented as a recruiter?
• How to solve the chicken-and-egg problem of job boards?
• What are the most common HR terms?
• What is the recruiting process of a staffing agency?
  
  

💎 Why It Matters

Recruiting is a ~$450,000,000,000 industry with a low barrier to entry and high-value sales.

🔍 Problem

Talent acquisition takes time.

💡 Solution

Recruiting businesses help you find, screen and qualify candidates fast.

🏁 Players

Placement Businesses

• Assembly Industries • Hire a full team of experts for your business
• JobRack • Hire remote talent in Eastern Europe
• RemotelyTalents • Find talent from Ukraine, Romania, Poland and more
• Movevirtual • Hire virtual assistants for design, support and marketing
• SecureVision • Add hands-on recruiters to your talent acquisition team
• The Collaborative Staffing • Full-service staffing agency
  

Recruiting Tools

• Deel • Platform for hiring remote talent in 100+ countries
• Leap Room • AI hiring assistant for tech, sales, marketing and more
• Frontend Mentor Hiring • Find junior front-end developers
• Recruit CRM • Workflow automation tool for staffing agencies
• Honeit • Turn calls and interviews into actionable talent insights
• TalentReef • Staffing tool for the hourly workforce
  
  

🔮 Predictions

• Recruiting businesses will use AI to save time finding and screening talent.
  • talent.ai uses AI to find and categorize talent by skill sets.
  • The Work In Me uses AI to lower search and placement times.
  • Turing uses AI to vet and match developers with their dream jobs.
  • Dedicare uses AI to find and screen candidates faster than competitors.

• We’ll see more vertical hiring services. They will help you find talent in specific, lower-cost locations.
  • Uplers helps to hire remote talent from India.
  • TalentQL helps to hire top tech talent from Africa.
  • Remote Talent LATAM helps you hire remote talent from Latin America.
  • RemotelyTalents helps you find talent from Ukraine, Romania, Poland and more.
  • Shepherd helps you hire full-time employees from the Philippines and Latin America.

• Staffing firms will focus on serving local businesses. Their knowledge of local communities will help them optimize for local values and culture.
  • Crown Staffing offers recruiting services to businesses in the Midwest.
  • Spherion has established relationships with local employers and communities.
  • Collaborative has a trusted reputation among local businesses in the UK’s Wigan and North West communities.
    
    

☁️ Opportunities

• Build a niche job board. Serve companies and candidates better by making design concessions to fit their unique needs.
  • DeafJobWizard shares jobs that don’t need full hearing abilities.
  • 4/day Week shares remote software jobs with 4-day workweeks.
  • WorkingNotWorking is a job board for creative talent with portfolios.
  • Y Combinator only shares jobs at its startups that you can filter by batch.
  • Women Who Code shares engineering jobs with women-friendly cultures.

• Build lead magnets to attract candidates. Offer free career tips, resume reviews, mock interviews and more.
  • ReachExt does free resume reviews for candidates.
  • Remote has guides on hiring remote talent for dozens of countries.
  • Relocate.me has a learning center with free guides for job seekers.
  • Wellfound helps candidates to know what they’re worth with the Salary Calculator.

• Build a hiring platform that uses AI to screen talent. Help recruiters save time finding, vetting and matching candidates.
  • Ceipal uses AI to find and screen candidates.
  • Arya uses AI to find, filter and engage with candidates.
  • Manatal uses AI to match candidates with jobs in seconds.
  • Globus uses AI to find, screen and engage with candidates.
  • XOR uses AI to automate talent search and interview scheduling.
    
    

🏔️ Risks

• Economic Downturns • Hiring during a recession is hard as companies cut costs.
• Bad Hire Costs • The average cost of one bad hire is $15,000. Clients can recover losses from you for placing a candidate without proper vetting.
  
  

🔑 Key Lessons

• Niching down can help you succeed. It’s easier to hire developers than to hire developers, marketers, lawyers and executives. Don’t try to boil the ocean.
• Building a vetted, high-quality talent pool can help you deal with a talent shortage. It’s easier to fill your talent pipeline with qualified candidates when you don’t have to wait for them to apply.
• It’s easier to fill a vacancy if the employer has a great brand, benefits and values.
  
  

🔥 Hot Takes

• We’ll see “informal recruiters” as companies use referral bonuses to attract talent. We’ll pay $1,000 to anyone who helps us hire Trends.vc Analysts. Paraform pays you for recruiting for startups.
• Companies will prefer productized services for common needs such as design and development.
• Staffing agencies will use collaborative hiring. They will invite the client’s team to the screening and testing process.
  
  

😠 Haters

“As a recruiter, how can I avoid being circumvented if I place a candidate?”
Japan Dev motivates clients to tell about a successful hire via late fees and ¥3000 Amazon Gift Cards. Word-of-mouth is effective too. As other recruiters discover this type of behavior, they may choose not to work with those companies and candidates.

“It’s hard to find a niche that is large enough to build a recruiting business but small enough to not be saturated.”
Unless it’s a marketplace-like business such as job boards, the recruiting space is fragmented and no recruiter can serve all the world’s needs. You can tap into most of these markets and there’s proven demand in each.

“How can I solve the chicken-and-egg problem to build a job board?”
Borrow supply from other job boards. Do things that don’t scale and hand-pick jobs. Engage with communities where talent hangs out. Do this until you have enough traffic to monetize with paid job posts.

“Offering paid career coaching to those in the same role sounds like a recipe for moral hazard. The coach can make more money when candidates switch roles often.”
It can be wise to switch coaches if you feel like the coach is not living up to your expectations.

“It’s not that easy to enter this industry.”
It depends on what you want to offer. While you may need a great reputation to do executive search, a good reputation can help you get started with simpler placements. If you’re a good React developer, chances are you can recruit another good React developer for your client.

🔗 Links

1. Looking for Bootstrapped Businesses in the Hiring Sector • The Tweet behind this report.
2. Glossary for HR Terms • List of the most common HR terms.
3. The Recruitment Process of a Staffing Agency • Guide on finding and vetting candidates.
   
   

📁 Related Reports

• ​​​​​Lead Generation • Find potential clients with high lifetime value.
• Agencies • Help clients solve problems without hiring and managing large teams.
• Consulting • Consulting helps you learn more and earn more.
• Personal Brands • Good personal brand gives you pricing power and opportunities.
• Micro-Consulting • Turn years of experience into a short call.
  
  

🙏 Thanks

Thanks to Elie Steinbock, Sumant Yerramilly, Stewart Townsend and Maisha Cannon. We had a great time jamming on this report.

✏️ Emin researched and wrote this report. Dru researched and edited this report.

📈 What else?

Trends PRO #0123 — Recruiting Businesses has more insights.

What you’ll get:

• 18 Placement Business Examples (200% More)
• 18 Recruiting Tools (200% More)
• 8 Predictions (167% More)
• 15 Opportunities (400% More)
• 5 Risks (150% More)
• 11 Key Lessons (267% More)
• 6 Hot Takes (100% More)
• 12 Links (300% More)

With Trends Pro you’ll learn:

• (📈 Pro) How to follow foreign laws when hiring remotely?
• (📈 Pro) Which recruiting companies offer premade teams instead of individuals?
• (📈 Pro) How to monetize your work experience?
• (📈 Pro) Which recruiting companies offer top talent curation services?
• (📈 Pro) Why build a marketplace with hand-picked jobs?
• (📈 Pro) How to get insights into candidates’ hard and soft skills?
• (📈 Pro) What are fractional HR services?
• (📈 Pro) How to measure the success of your hiring strategies?
• (📈 Pro) What do candidates seek in a staffing agency?
• (📈 Pro) What can save you from paying for bad hires?
• (📈 Pro) Who offered to pay $100,000 for referring a candidate?
• (📈 Pro) What are alternative ways to spot talent?
• (📈 Pro) How can AI lead to discrimination?
• (📈 Pro) What will companies focus on instead of resumes?
• (📈 Pro) How to boost the candidate-job fit rate?
• (📈 Pro) How to build a job board over the weekend?
• (📈 Pro) How to interview candidates?
• (📈 Pro) How to find candidates on LinkedIn?
• (📈 Pro) What are 15 recruitment marketing strategies?
• (📈 Pro) How to hire great remote candidates?
• (📈 Pro) What are the 12 types of hiring bias?
• (📈 Pro) Who grew a 2-person recruiting business to $960,000 per year?
• And much more…
  
  

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🧠 Founder Mastermind Groups • To share goals, progress and solve problems together, each group is made up of 6 members who meet for 1 hour each Monday.

📈 100+ Trends Pro Reports • To make sense of new markets, ideas and business models, check out our research reports.

💬 1:1 Founder Intros • Make new friends, share lessons and find ways to help each other. Keep life interesting by meeting new founders each week.

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💲 100k+ Startup Discounts • Get access to $100k+ in startup discounts on AWS, Twilio, Webflow, ClickUp and more.

Brought to you by the team behind HeadsUp

This week’s Founder Finds includes:

• An AI text-to-song tool
• How to build a 5-year plan
• A video series on the basics of AI
• A step-by-step landing page guide
• An AMA about reaching $100,000 ARR
• A reminder about taking responsibility
• An essay on the network effects of ideas
• And more…

🪶 Remember This

Believe you can and you’re halfway there.

🤓 Fav Finds

Tools, tweets and more from Trends Pro Members

🎨 Landing Page Guide shared by Royce Johnson
A step-by-step guide to building high-converting landing pages

🤖 How AI Works shared by Prabhjot Singh Lamba
A YouTube playlist of short videos to learn about the basics of AI

🎵 Suno AI shared by Stewart Townsend
An AI tool that generates songs from text prompts. Listen to some examples here

🔧 Try This

Create a 5-Year Plan That Fires You Up

Do you know what you want or will be doing in 5 years?

It’s easy to get lost in your daily routine and lose sight of goals you have for the future.

Learn how to make a 5-year plan with a long-term vision and key steps to achieving your goals.

🌟 Founder of the Week

Nik McFly

“I love Trends Pro. The reports are great and the community is awesome.”

Nik is building Hybrain.Academy. It’s an AI school for non-techies that helps them learn AI to save time and money doing personal and business tasks.

What product or service do you wish existed?
AI SaaS that helps people build good habits.

What product are you obsessively using right now?
ChatGPT. It helps me work faster.

What are you bullish on?
AI agents. These will help us remove inefficiencies.

What are you bearish on?
Nation-state. Nation-states lead to fights and bias They make it harder for people to move freely and ignore the voice of small groups.

What’s your favorite Trends Report?
🤖 ChatGPT

Because my ChatGPT online course was included! 🙂

Exclusive Deal: Nik is offering Trends.vc readers 20% off his ChatGPT Cash Cow course using the code TRENDSVC20.

💬 Join the Conversation

Here’s what Trends Pro Members are talking about…

• (📈 Pro) Using Evernote vs Notion
  
• (📈 Pro) How to find a co-founder
  
• (📈 Pro) The fastest path to product launch

📘 Read This

How Ideas Grow

Everything we do is based on narratives — stories that explain how the world works.

• AI is booming – you started building an AI startup.
• You heard carbs are bad – you started eating salads for lunch.
• You saw “true love” in a movie – you broke up because it didn’t feel right.

Narratives have network effects. When more people see that the narrative is promising, more people start using it, investing in it, talking about it and building it.

That’s how ideas grow.

🎧 Listen To

It’s Not Your Fault, But It Is Your Responsibility

Expecting nothing but good feels like a good mindset. But then life happens.

There are dogs that get sick in the middle of the night, unpleasant conversations, hard decisions and more. Most people’s reaction is to shirk.

Things are hard and scary. It’s not your fault. But it’s your responsibility to do what has to be done.

🏆 Trends Pro Member Wins

👥 Gab, Frank Jones and Jinay Shah unlocked 1:1 Founder Intros by joining daily standups

💯 Maciej Cupial hosted an AMA about Calendesk’s journey to $100,000 ARR

🎙️ Simon Daley was featured in a podcast

✒️ Dale Williams wrote about ethics in coaching

🎞️ Elie Steinbock’s YouTube channel reached 100+ subscribers

🐺 Stewart Townsend signed the first customer for Podcast Wolf

💌 Yarty reached 1,000 subscribers for FP&HEY

🚗 Prabhjot Singh Lamba built a simple car game with Spline

📝 Maisha Cannon launched a guide for recruiters

Get Weekly Reports

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📈 Unlock Pro Reports, 1:1 Intros and Masterminds

Become a Trends Pro Member and join 1,200+ founders enjoying…

🧠 Founder Mastermind Groups • To share goals, progress and solve problems together, each group is made up of 6 members who meet for 1 hour each Monday.

📈 100+ Trends Pro Reports • To make sense of new markets, ideas and business models, check out our research reports.

💬 1:1 Founder Intros • Make new friends, share lessons and find ways to help each other. Keep life interesting by meeting new founders each week.

🧍 Daily Standups • Stay productive and accountable with daily, async standups. Unlock access to 1:1 chats, masterminds and more by building standup streaks.

💲 100k+ Startup Discounts • Get access to $100k+ in startup discounts on AWS, Twilio, Webflow, ClickUp and more.

Brought to you by the team behind HeadsUp

“Getting information off the internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.” – Mitchell Kapor

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❓ What You’ll Learn

• How to sell sponsorships?
• How to grow your daily newsletter?
• How to build a value ladder?
• How to calculate customer acquisition costs?
• How to use AI to write daily content?
• What are daily newsletter networks?
• Why are local daily newsletters important?
• Who is building paid communities around daily newsletters?
• Who is building niche job boards around daily newsletters?
• Who sold $100,000 in sponsorships with only 10,000 subscribers?
  
  

💎 Why It Matters

You can build direct relationships with your audience at scale.

🔍 Problem

The world moves fast. It’s hard to keep up with the latest news.

💡 Solution

Daily newsletters help you stay informed on industry news and trends.

🏁 Players

Daily Newsletters

• The Daily Stoic • Short daily emails on stoic philosophy.
• Refind • The best curated articles from the web.
• Quartz Daily Brief • News from the global economy.
• TLDR • 5-minute tech news round-ups.
• TheFutureParty • Daily coverage of the entertainment industry.
• The Rundown • Breaking AI news.
  

Newsletter Tools

• beehiiv • The newsletter platform built for growth.
• Ghost • Open-source email platform for content creators.
• Passionfroot • Build a storefront that converts more sponsors. 
• BeyondWords • Converts text-based content into audio.
• Get Response • All-in-one tool for email marketing.
  
  

🔮 Predictions

• Daily newsletters will use AI to write content. AI will boost productivity by automating content curation, drafting, publishing and more.
  • AiHunt used GPT-4 to automate 99% of writing.
  • Prompt Entrepreneur writes a 1500-word daily newsletter using AI.

• Daily newsletters will grow into newsletter networks. They will become a go-to source of news for multiple industries.
  • The Daily Upside grew its reach with Patent Drop and Power Corridor.
  • TLDR started out covering tech news. Now they cover AI, Crypto and more.
  • Morning Brew started with business news. Then they expanded into professional brands.

• There will be more local daily newsletters. Readers want to stay up-to-date on news and events in their cities.
  • blogTO sends daily top news stories in Toronto.
  • The Edinburgh Guardian rounds up daily news in Edinburgh.
  • 6AM City is a group of daily newsletters that cover the local news in select American cities.
    
    

☁️ Opportunities

• Sell sponsorships. Help brands reach qualified prospects.
  • Anthony Castrio explains how a daily newsletter can earn $150,000 a year.
  • Superhuman charges $2,999 for a main ad spot and $1,499 for a featured ad. 
  • Prompt Engineering Daily offers main ads for $3,000 and classified ads for $300.
  • Marketing Max earned $100,000 with 10,000 subscribers from his e-commerce newsletter.

• Build a niche job board. Help your readers find career opportunities in the niche you cover.
  • TLDR jobs shares tech jobs.
  • Bankless curates Web3 jobs.
  • Girlboss Daily curates jobs from many industries.

• Build a paid community. Bring together like-minded people and help them learn from each other.
  • Milk Road offers a Pro version of its newsletter with deeper crypto insights.
  • Letters from an American sells access to the newsletter archive for $5 a month.
  • Stratechery Plus gives access to subscriber-only updates, interviews, podcasts and more.
  • Sinocism writes expert analyses and curates news related to China. They offer a premium subscription for subscriber-only posts and community access.
    
    

🏔️ Risks

• Burnout • It can be hard to make content every day.
• Platform Risk • Most email accounts are on Gmail. You’re subject to Google’s policies and outages.
• Data Privacy Laws • Data privacy can hurt your email deliverability.
  
  

🔑 Key Lessons

• Pick a topic that has enough content for a daily newsletter. Combine related topics if your subject is too niche.
• Build a value ladder to upsell products. Engage readers with free content before promoting your paid offer.
• Quality and consistency matter. Do not sacrifice quality for the sake of your publishing cadence.
  
  

🔥 Hot Takes

• Customer acquisition costs will rise as more newsletters enter the market. Newsletters will need to find cheaper marketing channels.
• Daily newsletters deliver bite-sized content. It will become more difficult for in-depth writing to succeed.
  
  

😠 Haters

“How are daily newsletter businesses defensible in the age of AI-generated content?”
AI-generated content is missing a unique voice and perspective. Audiences want to be entertained and connected to creators. Daily communication with readers builds loyalty and trust. 

“Monthly, weekly, now daily newsletters. Why should I clog my inbox with daily emails?”
Daily newsletters send timely information. They keep you up to date on fast-moving industries and urgent news. They save you time with a value-packed email every day.

“Daily newsletters can be biased. Who decides what content gets featured?”
The best way to handle bias is to get your news from different sources. Daily newsletters are just one source out of many.

🔗 Links

1. Looking for Daily Newsletters • The tweet behind the report. 
2. The Ultimate Guide to Email Newsletters • Learn how to grow and monetize your email newsletter.
3. 5 Essential Elements for a Great Newsletter • Learn what makes a good newsletter.
   
   

📁 Related Reports

• ​​​​​Paid Newsletters • Paid subscriptions are a revenue source for daily newsletters.
• Email Courses • Daily newsletters sell email courses to monetize their audience.
• Personal Brands • Growing a daily newsletter builds a loyal following.
• Curation as a Service • Curation is a popular content format for daily newsletters.
• The Creator Economy • Creators can capture value by making content for a niche audience.
  
  

🙏 Thanks

Thanks to Uwe Dreissigacker, Bernardt J. Vogel, Errol Tiozon, Stewart Townsend, Zarinah C., Chris Bulen, Tarek Zalt and Meiko S. Patton. We had a great time jamming on this report.

✏️ Nathaniel researched and wrote this report. Dru and Emin edited this report.

📈 What else?

Trends PRO #0122 — Daily Newsletters has more insights.

What you’ll get:

• 21 Daily Newsletter Examples (250% More)
• 10 Newsletter Tools (100% More)
• 8 Predictions (167% More)
• 8 Opportunities (167% More)
• 5 Risks (67% More)
• 6 Key Lessons (100% More)
• 4 Hot Takes (100% More)
• 8 Links (167% More)

With Trends Pro you’ll learn:

• (📈 Pro) Why turn daily newsletters into podcasts?
• (📈 Pro) Who is building million-dollar daily newsletters?
• (📈 Pro) How to use AI-generated images to boost reader engagement?
• (📈 Pro) How to monetize daily newsletters beyond ads?
• (📈 Pro) How to build a content engine?
• (📈 Pro) How to keep high deliverability?
• (📈 Pro) How to stand out from competitors?
• (📈 Pro) How to win readers’ attention?
• (📈 Pro) Why are daily newsletters great for experiments?
• (📈 Pro) How to boost email open rate with ChatGPT?
• And much more…
  
  

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🧠 Founder Mastermind Groups • To share goals, progress and solve problems together, each group is made up of 6 members who meet for 1 hour each Monday.

📈 100+ Trends Pro Reports • To make sense of new markets, ideas and business models, check out our research reports.

💬 1:1 Founder Intros • Make new friends, share lessons and find ways to help each other. Keep life interesting by meeting new founders each week.

🧍 Daily Standups • Stay productive and accountable with daily, async standups. Unlock access to 1:1 chats, masterminds and more by building standup streaks.

💲 100k+ Startup Discounts • Get access to $100k+ in startup discounts on AWS, Twilio, Webflow, ClickUp and more.

Brought to you by the team behind HeadsUp

This week’s Founder Finds includes:

• How to ship projects fast
• The two types of confidence
• How to price your expertise
• A talk about doing what you love
• A guide on ChatGPT Code Interpreter
• How to use the AIDA copywriting model
• A story of going from $0 to $58,000 MRR
• And more…

🪶 Remember This

If you look closely, most overnight successes took a long time.

🤓 Fav Finds

Tools, tweets and more from Trends Pro Members

⚙️ Code Interpreter Guide shared by Maisha Cannon
A blog post on the use cases of ChatGPT Code Interpreter

✍️ The AIDA Model shared by Eddie Forson
A guide to the classic copywriting formula with examples and templates

❤️ Do What You Love shared by Prabhjot Singh Lamba
The founder of Mailchimp talks about quitting your job and doing what you love

📘 Read This

The Winner’s Edge

To succeed, you must take risks. To take risks, you must have confidence.

There are 2 types of confidence.

• Phony confidence: You think you understand something that you don’t.
• Expert confidence: You know what you’re doing and what it will lead to.

If you don’t know which type of confidence you have, it’s best to assume it’s phony. This will help you make sure that you have a large margin of safety for the risks you can’t see.

🌟 Founder of the Week

Sumant Yerramilly

“My experience with Trends Pro has been great. It’s nice to see other founders go through the ups and downs together. This gives me comfort knowing that we are on this journey of entrepreneurship together.”

Sumant is building Assembly Industries. He helps founders hire vetted offshore talent and pre-made teams who are experts in sales, marketing, finance and operations. On a fractional or full-time basis.

What’s your most important habit?
HIIT workouts in the morning. It helps to clear my mind and puts me in a meditative state to help you relax before starting your day.

What are you reading right now?
Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

I’m interested in ancient civilizations and what helped them rise and fall.

What product or service do you wish existed?
An easy meeting scheduler for groups. Calendly does a great job on one-way scheduling but if there are two or more people, it becomes hard to coordinate across time zones and calendar tools.

What product are you obsessively using right now?
I’m using VEED to share my journey on social media. I love how they keep it simple yet innovative with avatars, auto-captions and more.

What are you bullish on?
Building businesses is becoming easier. I’m bullish on using AI to unleash creativity. The rate of innovation will grow up to 400% in the next 5 years.

What are you bearish on?
The AI hype. Lots of companies are raising capital and hundreds of companies are now offering the same features around ChatGPT. Once it’s over, I wonder how many tools will be AI integrations vs standalone AI products.

What’s your favorite Trends Report?
🔁 Productized Services

It inspired me to start Assembly Industries. I realized that many businesses want to get X done for $Y price. They don’t want to go the traditional hiring route. If you can deliver high-quality talent for a flat fee, companies  will pay. In fact, they will pay a lot.

Exclusive Deal: Sumant is offering Trends.vc readers $250 off the first month of hiring an expert with Assembly Industries. To take advantage, send an email to cs@assembly-industries.com and mention Trends.vc.

💬 Join the Conversation

Here’s what Trends Pro Members are talking about…

• (📈 Pro) Using Evernote vs Notion
  
• (📈 Pro) No-code website building tools
  
• (📈 Pro) Experience with freelance platforms

🎧 Listen To

How to Not Suck at Project Management

Ben Orenstein and Adam Wathan share the strategies they use to ship projects within the first few days and to keep them shippable until the release.

• Do Small Tasks: Do not delay quick tasks, do them now.
• Don’t Overcomplicate: Do a great version of a simple product.
• Build a Roadmap: Make your work-in-progress visible to avoid taking on too much.

❔ Ask Yourself

How Much Insight to Give Away on Your Website?

You ask this question because you don’t want others to copy you, use your advice for free or know your unique sales proposition before hopping on a call with you.

David C. Baker says that the more insight you publish for free, the less you need to invest in the sale. As you build trust, you will have fewer long sales cycles with test work and multiple meetings that eat up your time and energy.

🏆 Trends Pro Member Wins

👥 Ryan Booher unlocked 1:1 Founder Intros by joining daily standups

📈 Mac Martine shared his journey from $0 to $58,000 MRR with The SaaS Bootstrapper

🧰 Prabhjot Singh Lamba made an onboarding tutorial for Craftar

🤖 Bernardt J. Vogel wrote about training AI with synthetic data

⛰️ Katt Risen got 270 new subscribers and sold $695 in sponsorships while traveling

🤔 Eddie Forson wrote about starting with a problem, not an idea

🦅 Stewart Townsend and Maciej Cupial launched Power Filters for Podcast Hawk

🦘 Michael Pearson-Adams moved the headquarters of MPA Creative to Australia

🧠 Chuck Hardy unlocked Trends.vc Masterminds by reaching 30-day standup streaks

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💬 1:1 Founder Intros • Make new friends, share lessons and find ways to help each other. Keep life interesting by meeting new founders each week.

🧍 Daily Standups • Stay productive and accountable with daily, async standups. Unlock access to 1:1 chats, masterminds and more by building standup streaks.

💲 100k+ Startup Discounts • Get access to $100k+ in startup discounts on AWS, Twilio, Webflow, ClickUp and more.

Brought to you by the team behind HeadsUp

“Connection is the energy that fuels the soul.” – Deepak Chopra

Get Full Access to Trends Pro

❓ What You’ll Learn

• How to build AI companions?
• What do AI companions offer that human companions don’t?
• How can influencers form deeper connections with their audience?
• How to scale your micro-consulting business with AI clones?
• How to automate your business?
• How to boost your productivity?
• How can AI companions impact relationships?
  
  

💎 Why It Matters

AI Companions can give you a sense of connection when friends and family are not around.

🔍 Problem

We have a fundamental need to feel heard and understood.

💡 Solution

AI companions offer meaningful connection with personalized support when you need it.

🏁 Players

AI Companions 

• Pi • Personal AI companion for supportive conversations and advice.
• Cleo • AI companion for personal finance.
• Kai • AI companion for well-being.
• Clare • Voice-based AI coach for mental well-being.
• Melli • Voice-controlled AI companion built for the elderly.
• Polly • Assistive AI that helps people with neurological conditions. 
  

AI Companion Tools

• Replika • Customize an AI companion for friendship and romantic relationships. 
• Character • AI companions based on people and characters. 
• Forever Voices • AI studio turning influencers into virtual companions.
• Claude • AI assistant for integrating into different business models.
• Chai • Create, share and find AI companions.
  
  

🔮 Predictions

• People will become immortal. We’ll see deceased people live as AI companions.
  • Replika founder Eugenia Kuyda built Roman Bot to preserve her late friend’s memories.
  • Hossein Rahnama’s project Augmented Eternity turns a person’s digital presence into an AI chatbot.

• Influencers will make digital versions of themselves available to their fans 24/7. This will help them form deeper connections with their audiences.
  • Amouranth launched an AI clone of herself to interact with her OnlyFans audience.
  • Caryn Marjorie has a digital version of herself that people can talk to and date for $1 per minute.

• We’ll see conversational internet driven by AI companions. They will bring search results into conversations.
  • Microsoft Edge added Bing Chat that gives results to your search queries.
  • Perplexity AI is a chat-based search engine that summarizes search results.
    
    

☁️ Opportunities

• Use AI companions to scale your micro-consulting business. Reach more clients in less time.
  • Jodie Cook made a clone of herself to offer 24/7 business coaching.
  • Deepak Chopra created Digital Deepak for people to access his wellness practices.
  • Kisson Lin built a digital twin of herself that people can talk to about her company Mindverse.

• Use AI companions to automate business tasks. This can lower operational costs and boost efficiency.
  • Crisp launched MagicReply, a virtual AI assistant for customer service.
  • Drippi is an AI assistant that writes and automates cold outreach messages for Twitter DMs.
  • Wendy’s launched an AI-powered robot for delivering food from the kitchen to parking spots.

• Delegate personal tasks to AI clones to boost your productivity.
  • Hamed made an AI clone of Lex Fridman to do slide presentations for him.
  • Ellie is an AI email assistant that replies to your emails in your writer’s voice.
  • Joanna Stern made an AI clone of herself to make phone calls and get her bank details.
    
    

🏔️ Risks

• Privacy Risk • Intimate thoughts shared with AI Companions can get hacked or misused. Hackers can use conversations for social engineering. Companies can misuse conversations by selling your data to advertisers.
• Artificial Romance •  AI Companions are not alive but people fall in love with them. Unhealthy attachments can lead to mental health issues. Replika removed “Erotic Roleplay” and restored it when users were upset by the update.
  
  

🔑 Key Lessons

• Human companions have competing priorities. Your AI companion is there for you 24/7.
• You can use AI Companions to practice real-life interactions. This can improve your well-being and communication skills.
  
  

🔥 Hot Takes

• AI companions will know us better than we know ourselves. They will learn your behavioral patterns and help you make decisions based on your personality and goals.
• AI Companions will become a part of your life. You will use AI companions to efficiently do your personal and professional tasks.
  
  

😠 Haters

“The loneliness epidemic will get worse with the rise of AI companions.”
Too much of anything is harmful. Human companions aren’t always available when you need them. AI Companions fill in the gap and help to deal with loneliness. Some people have married their AI Companions. 

“AI Companions can give harmful advice.”
Sure. AI models can give bad advice. It’s wise to verify information shared by AI companions if you rely on them in your personal and professional life.

“AI Companions will take our jobs in the next few years.”
AI has already automated many jobs in various industries. Instead of competing with AI, add AI tools to your workflow.

🔗 Links

1. Get Ready for Our Report on AI Companions • The Tweet behind this report.
2. The Rise of AI Companions • A mini-documentary on AI Companions.
   
   

📁 Related Reports

• ​​​​​ChatGPT • AI companions can be built using ChatGPT.
• Voice Cloning • Build an AI companion that uses your voice. 
• Virtual Influencers • AI Companions can become virtual influencers.
• AI-Generated Content • Discover AI tools for generating image, voice and video content.
• AI Image Generators • Use AI image generators to create avatars for AI Companions.
  
  

🙏 Thanks

Thanks to Marcos Gorgojo, Prabhjot Singh Lamba and Alex Doda. We had a great time jamming on this report.

✏️ Karina researched and wrote this report. Dru and Emin edited this report.

📈 What else?

Trends PRO #0121 — Virtual AI Companions has more insights.

What you’ll get:

• 14 AI Companion Examples (133% More)
• 13 AI Companion Tools (160% More)
• 7 Predictions (133% More)
• 7 Opportunities (133% More)
• 4 Risks (100% More)
• 3 Key Lessons (50% More)
• 4 Hot Takes (100% More)
• 8 Links (300% More)

With Trends Pro you’ll learn:

• (📈 Pro) What are 100+ AI companions for specific tasks?
• (📈 Pro) How to personalize your AI companion?
• (📈 Pro) How to build an AI bot with your data? 
• (📈 Pro) How are AI companions different from other chatbots?
• (📈 Pro) How to create unique experiences with AI companions?
• (📈 Pro) How to build a digital version of yourself?
• (📈 Pro) How can AI companions boost quality of life?
• (📈 Pro) How will AI companions blend into our lives?
• (📈 Pro) How will AI companions transform the medical industry?
• (📈 Pro) How to use AI companions for dating?
• (📈 Pro) How to preserve memories with loved ones?
• And much more…
  
  

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📈 100+ Trends Pro Reports • To make sense of new markets, ideas and business models, check out our research reports.

💬 1:1 Founder Intros • Make new friends, share lessons and find ways to help each other. Keep life interesting by meeting new founders each week.

🧍 Daily Standups • Stay productive and accountable with daily, async standups. Unlock access to 1:1 chats, masterminds and more by building standup streaks.

💲 100k+ Startup Discounts • Get access to $100k+ in startup discounts on AWS, Twilio, Webflow, ClickUp and more.

Brought to you by the team behind HeadsUp

This week’s Founder Finds includes:

• A daily planner app
• An AI text-to-video tool
• How to set the right KPIs
• Assets for sale under $15k
• Why you should travel more
• How to capture more emails
• 300+ data visualization tools
• How to get your first 100 users
• And more…

🪶 Remember This

Turn one day into day one.

🤓 Fav Finds

Tools, tweets and more from Trends Pro Members

🎥 Fliki shared by Swapnil Puranik
An AI text-to-video tool to create content quick 

🎯 Setting KPIs and Goals shared by Chuck Hardy
A video on setting the right KPIs and priorities for your startup 

📊 Data Visualization Resources shared by Prabhjot Singh Lamba
A collection of 300+ data visualization tools, apps, libraries and more

🔧 Try This

Ways to Get 100 First Users

Get your first 100 users with 107 marketing ideas with step-by-step instructions.

• Affiliate Marketing: Get others to sell for you.
• Side Project Marketing: Build side projects to generate leads.
• Influencer Marketing: Transfer trust and attention from influencers to brands.

🌟 Founder of the Week

Jordan Divecha

“I’ve made great friends and met collaborators in Trends Pro. I’m always learning from Trends Pro Members in the community and masterminds while building alongside awesome people!”

Jordan is building Everyday Innovation. A resource hub, podcast and community that helps “creatorpreneurs” build and launch impactful businesses.

What’s your most important habit?
I journal at least once in the morning and once at night. This helps me spend my days with intention and gratitude. I have learned more about myself through this practice. With so much going on in my life as a mom, entrepreneur, and just as a human in general, it has been incredibly valuable.

What are you reading right now?
The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

Building a business in tough times or in a new niche requires resilience and a strategic mindset. This book helped me get this unique perspective on how to do that.

What product or service do you wish existed?
I wish there was an AI tool that could connect all of my bookmarks from different apps and organize my information into easily searchable and readable data and insights.

What product are you obsessively using right now?
Besides several AI tools for brainstorming, content refinement and editing… I’d have to go with a solid favorite over the years, Sunsama!

It keeps my (neurodivergent) brain organized when it comes to projects, tasks, events and proper time management.

What are you bullish on?
From a general perspective, I am bullish on the democratization of innovation. I support tech innovation that lower barriers to entry, such as no-code and low-code, open-source projects, community-based collaboration platforms, creator tools and AI.

What are you bearish on?
Traditional online course formats. Conversion and completion rates aren’t worth the time and effort for most edu-creators. I think the majority of people are tired of self-paced content without actionable exercises, a community of peers and/or a cohort to get support and accountability.

What’s your favorite Trends Report?
🦄 Startup Studios

It is the first Trends Pro report that I read. It absolutely blew my mind that a business model that I wanted to build actually existed and had a name. I am actively building my own startup studio and I believe that we’ll see many studios started by indie hackers and solopreneurs alongside their communities.

What else?
I’m always looking for creator-entrepreneurs for my podcast Everyday Innovation.

Want to be a guest? Apply here!

Exclusive Deal: Jordan is offering Trends.vc readers 50% off any Innovisory Session with the code TRENDS50.

💬 Join the Conversation

Here’s what Trends Pro Members are talking about…

• (📈 Pro) Using Evernote vs Notion
  
• (📈 Pro) No-code website building tools
  
• (📈 Pro) Experience with freelance platforms

📘 Read This

The Case for Traveling More

Travel isn’t reserved for the young, but a certain type of travel is only available while you are young.

• When you’re 20: you can hop from country to country, make friends with strangers in hours and roll with them for weeks.
• When you’re 40: travel becomes more domesticated, planned and family-friendly.
• When you’re 60: you have the time to travel freely but your energy is limited.

That “adventure” that you are delaying to some time in the future is not going to be there.

Seize it now or watch it disappear forever.

🎧 Listen To

How to Capture More Emails

Tim Stoddart and Ethan Brooks break down how successful newsletters build their websites to boost the conversion.

They talk about page design, pop-ups, incentives and crafting high quality calls to action that turn leads into subscribers.

🏆 Trends Pro Member Wins

👥 Tim Jones unlocked 1:1 Founder Intros by joining daily standups

📈 Trends.vc was featured in Entrepreneur.com

📝 Vasil built a template for collecting user feedback

🚀 Simon Daley launched linky and the Micro Assets newsletter

🤝 Uwe Dreissigacker started an affiliate program for BlogHandy

🎙️ Mehmet Gonullu launched the waitlist for ShowGenie

👥 Eddie Forson wrote about the TEDW method for user interviews

🧠 Vikash Kumar Prajapati and Errol Tiozon unlocked Trends.vc Masterminds by reaching 30-day standup streaks

Get Weekly Reports

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🧠 Founder Mastermind Groups • To share goals, progress and solve problems together, each group is made up of 6 members who meet for 1 hour each Monday.

📈 100+ Trends Pro Reports • To make sense of new markets, ideas and business models, check out our research reports.

💬 1:1 Founder Intros • Make new friends, share lessons and find ways to help each other. Keep life interesting by meeting new founders each week.

🧍 Daily Standups • Stay productive and accountable with daily, async standups. Unlock access to 1:1 chats, masterminds and more by building standup streaks.

💲 100k+ Startup Discounts • Get access to $100k+ in startup discounts on AWS, Twilio, Webflow, ClickUp and more.

Brought to you by the team behind HeadsUp

“Open source is about collaborating; not competing.” – Kelsey Hightower

Get Full Access to Trends Pro

❓ What You’ll Learn

• What are open-source ChatGPT alternatives?
• How to easily build and deploy open-source AI models?
• What are niche open-source AI models?
• How to build an audience interested in open-source AI?
• What is a copyleft license?
• What limits open-source AI development?
• How to win in the “blue ocean” with open-source AI?
• What are 200+ approved open-source licenses?
• What are 100+ open-source AI models?
  
  

💎 Why It Matters

Open-source AI helps us build faster by learning from each other.

🔍 Problem

Closed-source AI companies are gatekeepers.

They decide when and what you can use AI for.

💡 Solution

Open-source AI helps us learn from and build on each others’ work.

This turns an arms race into collaboration.

Now anyone can build ChatGPT.

🏁 Players

Open-Source AI Companies

• Explosion • Builds privacy-first AI tools
• Stability AI • Builds audio and image generation models
• Google DeepMind • Researches AI ethics and performance
  

Open-Source AI Platforms

• Hugging Face • Build and deploy open-source AI models
• Replicate • Build and run open-source models in the cloud
• Google Colab • Platform for machine learning research
  

Open-Source AI Models

• Stable Diffusion • Text-to-image model
• Riffusion • Text-to-audio model
• BLOOM • Open multilingual language model
  

Open-Source AI Datasets

• The Pile • Dataset of books, webpages, chat logs and more
• ImageNet • 14,000,000+ annotated images
• OIG • Dialogue data for AI chatbots
  

Open-Source AI Tools

• PyTorch • Framework for building deep learning models
• TensorFlow • Open-source machine learning framework
• Keras • Deep learning API for AI models
  

🔮 Predictions

• We’ll see more uncensored models. This is “true” open-source AI that follows the Rule 6 of “The Open-Source Definition”.
  • WizardLM is an uncensored AI model for text generation.
  • Mage is a free, fast and unfiltered Stable Diffusion model.
  • NSFW Story Generator is a story generator without morals.
  • NSFW Waifu Diffusion is an uncensored anime character generator.

• We’ll see open-source ChatGPT alternatives.
  • GPT4All is a free, local, privacy-first AI chatbot.
  • HuggingChat is an open-source ChatGPT alternative based on Open Assistant.
  • StableVicuna is an AI chatbot that uses Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback.

• We’ll see more platforms built to host open-source AI models. They will make it easier to build and deploy AI models.
  • Replicate lets you use open-source models at scale.
  • Hugging Face lets you build, train and deploy open-source AI models.
  • Google Colab lets you write, run and share machine learning code in the browser.
    
    

☁️ Opportunities

• Build a niche AI model. Cater to customers with AI tools designed for specific needs.
  • ICON turns images of humans into 3D clothed models.
  • Animated Drawings turns simple drawings into 2D animations.
  • QR Code AI Art Generator makes background images for QR codes.
  • Text2Light turns text into 4K HDR panoramas for 3D scenes, VR and more.

• Offer paid subscriptions to your open-source AI tools. Monetization helps your project sustain the AI race.
  • Coqui is a text-to-speech and voice cloning tool.
  • Lightning AI helps you train, deploy and build AI.
  • Cody helps you read, write and understand code.
  • Giskard helps to lower bias and performance errors in AI models.

• Cover new advances in open-source AI. Build an audience by sharing open-source AI news, tools and companies.
  • The Breakdown talks about open-source AI agents such as AutoGPT and SuperAGI.
  • Last Week in AI writes about open-source models such as PandaGPT and DragGAN.
  • Aitrepreneur covers open-source AI models such as Falcon-40B, WizardCoder and more.
  • Two Minute Papers covers AI agents and image generators such as AutoGPT and Stable Diffusion.
  • The Rundown AI writes about open-source tools and models such as Transformers Agent and Prem.
    
    

🏔️ Risks

• Race to the Bottom • New open-source models quickly replace the old ones. You can get stuck in a rat race by trying to keep up with the pace. Don’t fall into a coma.
• Copyleft • These licenses let you change code but you must open source any tool made with it. Making it impossible to build proprietary tools with “copylefted” code.
• Copyright • It is hard to verify if contributed code or training data is copyright-free. This can lead to lawsuits for using copyrighted work without permission.
  
  

🔑 Key Lessons

• Open-source addresses the problem of vendor lock-in and high switching costs. Platforms such as Hugging Face make it easier to find AI models that fit your use cases.
• Open-source AI lets individuals build niche applications that large closed-source companies don’t have the time, insight or interest to build. From generating 3D landscapes to turning images into music.
• Clear documentation boosts the quality and adoption of your open-source AI tool. It helps users and contributors understand what your tool does and how it works.
  
  

🔥 Hot Takes

• AI regulations will force AI companies to open up about their closed-source configurations. OpenAI released GPT-4 without detail on how they built it. As US President Joe Biden weighs in on AI safety, OpenAI has explained how it ensures safety.
• Open-source AI deployment is limited by hardware shortage. Open-source projects are usually run by small teams and solo developers. Who may not have access to the computing power needed for their projects.
  
  

😠 Haters

“Open-source AI is less performant than AI models made by established companies.”
Open-source AI models can be a little worse but a lot less expensive. Depending on your use case, it can be wise to sacrifice quality without wasting lots of money.

“Companies like Meta root for ‘open research’ until they find an edge. Then become closed-source to maintain it. It’s hypocrisy.”
Tech giants are commercial companies. Google invented and open-sourced Transformers that drive modern AI research. Meta open-sourced the code for LLaMA and its leaked version is used to build dozens of other models. They have spent billions on research and hardware. We can’t judge them for trying to compensate for their efforts.

“Closed-source companies make use of both internal and open-source AI research.”
True. Some open-source projects may not exist without support from closed-sourced companies.

🔗 Links

1. We Have an Upcoming Report on Open-Source AI • The tweet behind this report.
2. OSI-Approved Licenses • List of 200+ open-source licenses.
3. Open LLM Leaderboard • List of 100+ open-source AI models with performance tests.
   
   

📁 Related Reports

• ​​​​​Monetized Open Source • Monetization helps open-source projects to sustain.
• ChatGPT • ChatGPT boosts the productivity of businesses and individuals.
• Voice Cloning • Build an audio content machine that works anytime, anywhere.
• Agencies • Help companies solve problems without hiring and managing large teams.
• Prompt Engineering • Learn how to direct AI.
  
  

🙏 Thanks

Thanks to Matthew LaCrosse and Jonathan Parra. We had a great time jamming on this report.

✏️ Emin researched and wrote this report. Dru researched and edited this report.

📈 What else?

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This week’s Founder Finds includes:

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🌟 Founder of the Week

Barbara

“Trends.vc was one of the few newsletters I kept reading and I’m glad I decided to join the Trends Pro Community.”

Barbara is building bric, helping companies find and implement the best solutions to understand their customers and make the right decisions.

What’s your most important habit?
Cold showers, seas and reading before going to sleep.

What are you reading right now?
The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

I plan to read more fiction this year. Loving this one so far!

What product or service do you wish existed?
A machine that automatically folds your laundry in Marie Kondo-style and an e-reader that helps to memorize what you’re reading.

What product are you obsessively using right now?
Readwise Reader which helps to track and memorize newsletters. It has powerful highlighting features and AI that lets you summarize or “talk” to the text.

What are you bullish on?
E-bikes and e-scooters for (sub)urban environments. They are sustainable, cheap and often help you get from point A to point B faster than cars.

What are you bearish on?
Mass-produced AI-generated content. I am not against using AI writing tools, but it just makes me sad how many ebooks, blogs, videos, Tweets are just recycled content. People will recognize quality.

What’s your favorite Trends Report?
🔢 Data as a Service

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📘 Read This

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From relying on the kindness of strangers to meaningful philanthropy. 

There are 16 levels that define your financial (in)dependence.

• Level 0: Panhandling or raising money from people who don’t care about your success.
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• Level 16: Building a mindful, positive legacy.

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