The Hustle - 🧓 Today’s seniors are cooler than you

Happy Trends Tuesday!

Today we’ve got:

• 1 trend alert

• 1 piece of operator wisdom

• 1 article you should read

Let's get to it.

🚨 TREND ALERT

Picture this: It’s 2pm. Over 100 people are dressed to the nines as 1940s tea party guests, dancing to pounding rockabilly while flappers perform.

And everyone is 60+ years old.

As Vice put it: “Welcome to The Posh Club, an outrageous weekly cabaret-style party for people who — like the crockery the afternoon tea is served on — are of a certain vintage.”

Now, we’re not saying you need to get into the business of saucy entertainment for seniors. But loneliness is an epidemic — especially for the elderly — and they clearly want to have some fun.

And with one in six people being over 60 by 2030, it’s also a big market.

Here are some opportunities:

• Social exercise. Google searches for “water aerobics classes near me” are up 500%+ since 2020, per Ahrefs, and the activity is perfect for senior citizens. Chair yoga, Pilates, and walking groups are also seeing rising interest.
  
  
• Online communities. R/AskOldPeople is a subreddit where only those born before 1980 (yes, thank you, we all feel ancient now) can answer questions. It has grown more than 7x in just the last year. The new class of seniors need smart, dynamic, tech-savvy offerings and there is a lack of options targeted to this demographic.
  
  
• Sell shovels (so to speak). Partnering with startups that focus on in-person senior experiences is another option: provide transport solutions, catering, performances, costume rentals, or medical standby services. (Safety first, kids.)

🫡 EASY FIVE-YEAR PLANNING

🧠 OPERATOR WISDOM

Jasmine Star is the co-founder and CEO of Social Curator, a marketing education and SaaS company focused on creators.

Back in 2021, she wanted to raise money for growth, but didn’t want to give up equity or take on debt.

Her solution? A one-time offer with lifetime pricing that brought in $750k+ in nondilutive capital, in just 48 minutes.

Here’s how she pulled it off:

1. Build a waitlist. For two weeks prior to the sale, Jasmine ran a pre-launch announcement campaign to drive people to a waitlist, promising early access to the sale. In the end, 55% of all sales were driven from the waitlist.
   
   
2. Sell a story. Here’s the real magic of her approach: In the days leading up to the sale, she recorded a personalized video for every single person on her waitlist, telling them why she was running the sale and how she would use the money. “I can’t tell you how many people responded to that email, how many people sent me DMs, and were just like, ‘I’m all in’”, she told us.
   
   
3. Systematize support. To make sure messaging was consistent across all sales copy and support messages, the team prepared an exhaustive FAQ page with prewritten answers to all likely questions. Then, they programmed those answers as auto-responses in their chat support tool.

🔥 ARTICLE YOU SHOULD READ

If you’ve just woken up from a monthslong slumber, welcome! We need to talk about something called artificial intelligence.

And for those of you who have been around, you’ve likely heard a lot about AI, but you might not know the many ways it will impact businesses in 2023. 

Here’s a look at the data from 1.35k professionals plus tons of expert insights to make it all make sense.

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