The Hustle - 💰 $1m for your best startup pitch

Happy Trends Tuesday!

Before we get into things, how does a potential $1m investment sound?

HubSpot for Startups is cooking up a “Million Dollar Pitch” competition and wants to hear from you. Six lucky startups will be flown out to HubSpot’s INBOUND conference, given the VIP treatment, and will pitch their business to an all-star panel of judges. The winner will be considered for an investment of up to $1m from HubSpot Ventures 🎉.

Enter here, and we’ll see you at INBOUND!

OK, back to our regularly scheduled programming. Today we’ve got:

• 1 trend alert
• 1 piece of operator wisdom
• 1 startup you should know about

🚨 TREND ALERT

We’ve written about opportunities in skin care before, and about how those trends are moving into the hair care industry.

Now, our analysts have untangled yet another rising niche: scalp care.

This may be your sign to branch into scalp care products, especially if you already have a personal care brand.

(Or if you have a man in your life who still uses shampoo that doubles as body wash and conditioner. Ehem.)

Opportunities include:

• The info angle. Drive traffic to your brand by posting informative content on socials: #ScalpCare has 1.2B+ views on TikTok. Find questions consumers are asking (via Reddit and tools like AnswerThePublic) and create posts answering those questions on your socials, site, or blog.
  
  

• Scalp care accessories. Google searches for “scalp brush” are at an all-time high, but Ahrefs still ranks it as a medium difficulty keyword. The same is true for “scalp massager” (30k searches/month). Jungle Scout also shows certain silicone scalp massagers bringing in $2.1m per month on Amazon 😳.

🤝 101 WAYS TO NETWORK LIKE THE BEST

🧠 OPERATOR WISDOM

Trendster and marketing director Matt Czelej recently diverted 50%-90% of his customers’ Facebook budgets into TikTok.

We sat down with him to get the goods on how to build a TikTok strategy that doesn’t suck. Buckle up:

1. Track attribution. TikTok notoriously underreports attribution by 2.5x-3x. Matt uses post-purchase surveys (specifically Shopify’s Enquire Post Purchase Survey) to determine the success of each social platform.
   
   

2. Create TikTok-native content. Creativity is what drives success — so don’t make ads, make TikToks. Here are some formats Matt has had success with:

   • “Three reasons why I love [xyz]”

   • “TikTok made me buy it”
   • “Best gifts for [girlfriends], part 7”
     
     
3. Focus on direct purchases. TikTok ads can provide a boost to many different points in the funnel. But after lots of experimentation, Matt found the best ROI came from TikToks that directed customers straight to purchase.

🔥 STARTUP YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT

Carbon dioxide: Fun in your La Croix, not so fun in la atmosphere.

Warming oceans, shrinking ice sheets, and rising sea levels are just a few of the many troubling symptoms of excess carbon dioxide.

Scientists and entrepreneurs are working on solutions to curb emissions, and funding is pouring in to help them do it. More than a quarter of all venture capital funding in 2022 went to climate tech, totaling $260B in investments.

Read about five of the most innovative climate tech startups on The Hustle blog.

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