⚡ Signal - The perfect first-time business idea
The Signal
Hey!
Thanks to everyone who has applied for Startup Labs.
I'm super excited about what's in the making here. I haven't replied to everyone - hang tight. You'll get a note from me during the week.
The goal is to make a super valuable community for everyone, that means some vetting is required - sorry if you've missed out this time!
Let's get into it.
🚀 Startup Labs
// A business idea, discussed
✅ Making sleep great again
68% of US adults have difficulty sleeping at least once a week.
Currently, the average US adult sleeps 6 hrs and 48 mins. That compared with the average of 7 hrs 54 mins in 1942.
Since 1985, the number of adults in the US getting less than 6 hours of sleep per night has increased by 30%.
The estimated economic loss to the US economy each year as a result of sleep deprivation is US $411 billion. That's approx. 2.92% of the US GDP.
The CDC has officially labelled sleep disorders as a public health epidemic.
This all in the wake of science-backed research which has shown the importance of getting good sleep.
If you've ever lain in your bed at night for hours without being able to fall asleep; or sat down at your desk to do some work and felt like your brain has a rain cloud in it you'll know the severity of the problem that millions of people face world wide.
And people are cottoning on. The world has seen a huge shift towards healthy living: Exercise and diet are two areas that have rapidly expanded in the last few years. Sleep is the third part of the equation that Mckinsey expects to take off rapidly.
Here's how you can start a not-so-sleepy business.
⚡ The opportunity: Here are three ways (among many) you can solve the sleep problem (each with a varying degree of difficulty/expertise required):
1. Education: Teaching people to sleep better.
2. Product: Facilitating better sleep.
3. Aids: Assisting in getting better sleep.
The lowest barrier to entry is education. It's low risk, almost anyone can do it and it has the potential to morph into any of the other two options when you find traction.
We're going to start a business that educates, and then helps customers follow through.
--
There are 3 main sleep education websites: sleepadvisor.com, sleepopolis.com and thesleepjudge.com.
The majority of their content is around mattresses. Why? Affiliate earnings. They're lead generators for mattress companies.
We don't want to compete with them on this. Sleepadvisor.org's two most shared articles on Facebook are:
The common denominator? People want to learn how to sleep better. They don't only want mattress reviews.
Check out the upward trend on these search topics (and search volume!):
We're going to create a hybrid website: 1 part content, 1 part coaching.
💥 Features:
Become a sleep facilitator. A three pronged attack:
Inform people about better sleep.
Help them follow through on best sleep practices.
Bring employers onboard to incentivize getting enough sleep.
Content on best sleep practices
Routines
Screen time
Blue light glasses
REM vs deep sleep
Sleep hours required
Benefits of better sleep etc.
A coaching service to help make that a reality
An on boarding survey
Current life situation
Biggest barrier to getting into bed
Current sleep behaviours
Current screen time
Current bed time routine
Waking up time
Tools/medication used currently
Matching with a sleep coach.
Sleep coach checks in periodically. Weekly = more expensive than daily. Frequency can change as person gets better at managing their own sleep cycle.
Providing actionable steps to overcoming current sleep-preventors.
Gamification of sleep using API's into sleep-trackers and a dashboard with rewards. Good sleep consistency = a free smoothie every week. Paid for by either a) A sponsor (eg: Casper or Purple) or b) Employer (More sleep = better work productivity).
🚀 Gameplan
Do some keyword research. Find the most commonly asked questions about sleep that you can rank for. Low search difficulty, relatively high volume. Don't be afraid to go after niche topics and long tail keywords (Eg: Night time routine for busy people). Don't just write generic articles. Write about things that matter. And write great content. Better than anyone else's content. The best content. (Sorry - got carried away there.)
Find the questions people are asking about sleep in forums and sleep communities: r/sleep and Quora are good places to ask. Look in specific sleep website forums too. Answer those.
Speak to authorities: Scientists, researchers, people from mattress companies. People love authority. Summarize their advise into easily digestible pieces of content. Post 'em.
Choose one social platform you'll be good at. My choice for the topic would be Pinterest and/or Instagram. Create a page and start making extremely share-worthy content. (Sleepadvisor.com's most popular article is basically a big infographic about sleep stats). People love infographics.
Spin up a Wordpress or Ghost website (super basic - don't focus on design) and post 10 pieces of content off the bat.
Add a newsletter sign up option with a lead magnet that is one of your infographics: "Get the 9 things you should do every night before bed to wake up feeling rested".
Engage in sleep communities. Answer questions on Quora, engage in r/sleep and other sub reddits where your ideal target market hangs out.
Get some brand partnerships. Once you've got a bit of a following (10 000 odd unique monthly visits) start engaging with D2C companies in the sleep game. Review their products. Make them super in depth reviews. As you do more of these, more companies will come to you, you won't have to go to them. If you battle starting off - go and buy the products and review them.
Start converting your audience to paid subscribers of your sleep coaching facility. This could be mostly automated using reminders, emails, and cleverly crafted content. Seek feedback on this product. Ask your customers how to make it better so that they'll never stop using it.
Engage with businesses. Start in the small-to-medium corporate space. +- 20 to 30 desk job employee's. Work up from there. Have a pitch deck which essentially illustrates two things: 1. Their employee's aren't sleeping enough and 2. How sleep affects productivity. Facilitate the process of helping their employee's getting better sleep. Use social proof of your coaching customers to convince.
As you grow, you'll start getting a sense for what the biggest problems facing consumers are. You can start building products which solve those problems.
🛠️ Skill Builder
// A byte of information to build your skill set
[2/10] Business growth
Check out last week's edition on cold emailing here.
🚧 Landing Pages
One of the most crucial elements of converting potentials into customers is a well-designed landing page.
Here's a good format to follow:
Landing Page Tips
[1] Menu. Sometimes fewer nav options are better for conversion rates. It depends what type of landing page it is.
[2] Hero. Value proposition + catchy image. Avoid stock photos. If you include an image - it must be striking. Value proposition sells the benefit of your product, it doesn't list features. Call to action to sign up/join.
[3] Social proof. Include logos of brands you've worked with. More well-known the better.
[4] Best features. How do these help your customers get to the value prop.
[5] Testimonials. From existing users. Solicit these if required. It never hurts to ask.
[6] More features. If you have more to talk about. Can be subbed in for a live demo of the product being used. Gifs etc.
[7] Footer. If it's a product landing page, have very few links in the footer.
🎤 From the Founder's Mouth
// A valuable piece of advice from someone who's done it before
Michael Cho on the success of Unsplash and how they went from 0 to 30k users on launch day and then 300k users in the months after:
The first version of Unsplash was made in 3 hours with $38, Dropbox and Tumblr. Launch day, 30k people subscribed from a Hacker News post that went #1. That was lucky. But hitting 300,000 subscribers in the months after with no product changes was not. Some lessons:
[1] Remove all barriers. Most existing services are overcomplicated. You will stand out by removing things that get in the way of what your customers want. We removed logins, photo sizes, licensing options. Anything that got in the way of the image download.
[2] Don't offer more, offer better. We started with 10 of the best images we could find. Meanwhile, most stock photo sites had 50 million images. Instead, of offering tons of images, sizes, and licenses, we offered one size, one price, one license.
[3] Show don’t tell. Let people play before they have to give you anything. We showed images big and bold on our homepage. No search, navigation, login, or paywalls.
[4] Pick a short, no-jargon tagline: Free, “do whatever you want” hi-resolution photos. 10 new photos every 10 days. Could fit in a tweet.
[5] Create a reason to come back. 10 images every 10 days.
[6] Create scarcity. 10 images every 10 days made each image feel more special. People subscribed so they didn't miss out on the next 10 images.
michael CHO, founder of Unsplash
⛹️ Yes Coach!
// Something you can do right now to improve your business
Do you know what your audience looks like?
If you've got a website that is getting traffic, you should have tracking setup that allows you to track what your audience looks like.
The Facebook pixel is a great way to do this.
Install it on your site and give it a few days of traffic. You'll be able to then see analytics on your traffic using Facebook's data.
A great addition to Google Analytics.
🖱️ Clickworthy
// Valuable tidbits from around the interweb
📧 5 Ways to Automate Your B2B Email Marketing (Sent to me by a subscriber after last week's cold email Skill Builder)
❇️ One of the best sales deck's I've ever seen. A lot of these rules can be applied to building a landing page.
😴 An excellent book about sleep - Why We Sleep by . In all the research for this post, this book popped up in a lot of places.
⚙️ Here's how to decide when you should automate and when you should personalize your sales process.
💥 How to generate business ideas.
👋 The End Notes
// I know, I know. I can almost hear you saying "Don't go, don't go."
That's it for this week. Hope there was some value in there for you.
How did you find this edition?
👍 YES - I liked it
〰️ MEH - Average
👎 NO - Almost no value
--
If you've found this interesting, valuable or entertaining, a few of your friends might too. Please forward on to them. Seriously, please do. I'll say a very nice thank you.
See yah next week, thanks for reading!
- Simon