Happy Trends Tuesday!

As a (self-appointed) dirty martini connoisseur, I’m fascinated by how experimental the ingredients of this classic drink have become.

Who would’ve thought that mixing chicken soup with gin was a good idea?

In the spirit of being experimental, we're serving you with our own blend today by combining two opportunities previously covered by Trends.

Because you don't have to always chase the new — sometimes the best business idea comes from the intersection of two existing ones. 

Real footage of Trends analysts making a blend. Source: Giphy

In today's email…

• Trends Blends: regenerative farming meets aging Boomers
• The ultimate unbundling special, from the Trends archive
• What we’re surfin’, from drunk business ideas to Logan Roy's next moves

Let's mix it up!

🤝 NEGOTIATION 101

Train your brain for high-pressure situations. Take our negotiation strategy guide and dive into persuasion, soft skills, common mistakes, and countering objections.

🥣 TRENDS BLENDS

How regenerative farming can help mitigate the senior housing crisis

Source: Google Trends, six months rolling average

Most impressively, marketplaces that distribute and trade carbon credits earned by well-doing regenerative farmers have received over $1.2B in funding.

Meanwhile, we’re a few short years away from a senior housing crisis. 

At 76m strong, Baby Boomers are nearly twice as big as the previous generation. As they enter their golden years, many will require some level of daily care. 

Not all of us are equipped to take that on at home, so assisted living becomes an inevitable solution. Institutionalized assisted living is a ~$92B industry, and boomers haven’t even moved in yet.

The first priority is simply to build. Currently, 810k+ people reside in assisted living communities in the US. This number is expected to more than double in the next 15 years, which means we need to start building yesterday. 

The problem? The construction industry is a leading culprit in carbon emissions.

The Opportunity 👇

Create a marketplace designed for regenerative farmers to sell their credits explicitly to projects that are achieving social impact, or niche down further to only cover senior housing.

Interested in building? Connect with regenerative farmers directly to create net-zero senior housing.

Graphic created by previous Trends editor, Kristin Egan 🧡

💾 FROM THE ARCHIVE

How to unbundle everything, from the Trends archive

Source: Greg Isenberg

Even if you only focus on a tiny slice of their target market, or perfect one single feature, you’ve got a solid foundation – taking 1% of a billion-dollar market share is nothing to scoff at. 

Besides, you can shave years off your venture timeline by building upon an idea that’s known to be in demand. Consumers will appreciate targeted offerings as well. 

Unbundling ideas from Trends

Here’s a rapid-fire lookback on some of the most popular unbundling ideas we’ve written about: 

1. Unbundling TikTok

Revyze is a French startup cashing in on the short-form video craze. The company has raised ~$2m to build the TikTok of education. 

Started to help French students with their baccalaureate curriculum, the app started offering SAT test prep in the US last October. 

The concept works because students would rather learn from their peers than teachers. The issue with TikTok is that it’s a generalist, whereas Revyze filters out any non-educational content.

The education niche was always ripe for unbundling – the #LearnOnTikTok hashtag has 860B+ views. You could break the niche down even further by creating “The TikTok of [X] educational content,” like #history, which has 136B+ views. 

2. Unbundling Expert Advice

Just Answer is a website that gives users access to thousands of verified experts, including doctors, lawyers, tutors, technicians, mechanics, vets, and more. The site enjoys 33m+ views/month from people looking for practical expert advice. 

There is an opportunity to unbundle Just Answer by creating a platform that caters to a specific niche. Reddit is a good place to find inspiration:

• r/LegalAdvice: 2.5m subscribers
• r/MechanicAdvice: 1.3m
• r/AskCulinary: 954k 
• r/AskElectronics: 718k 
• r/AskWomenAdvice: ~298k

3. Unbundling America’s Meat Processing Industry 

The US meat processing industry has a major problem: It’s too concentrated. 

Four meatpacking companies control over 80% of the US beef market. The lack of competition drives the prices of cattle down and meat up, hurting both farmers and consumers.

Several opportunities for entrepreneurs to unbundle this industry: 

• The US Department of Agriculture is investing $123m in grants to help independent meat processing and farming operations. You can help small meat processors access USDA funding as a consultant.
  
  
• Offer marketing services (think websites, PPC ads, or even local SEO) to new local meat packers who target consumers with extremely popular D2C and at-home delivery options.
  
  
• Global demand for meat is expected to rise 70%+ by 2050. You can enter the game by building your own meat processing operation ($1m-$8m), or use a small business loan and buy existing meat processing operations for 1-4x annual cash flow.

The future is unbundled

The great unbundling will continue to thrive in the years to come. For starters, we’ll see more apps and tools unbundling ChatGPT — it’s already happening with the launch of OpenAI’s GPT store. 

Like we said in our AI for Business Builders guide: Artificial intelligence will be the amalgamation of thousands of small, niche models. Businesses in the AI age will go in a similar direction – niche and specialized over big and bulky. 

🗂️ OPEN TABS

📊 Data: 19 ways marketing trends have changed from 2023 to 2024

💵 From X: How this AI founder went from 0 to $3m ARR in 18 months 

🍻 Buzzed: Watch Shaan and Sam come up with 8 biz ideas (while drunk)

👴🏻 Legacy: Brian Cox’s unconventional money moves after Succession hit