Happy Trends Tuesday!

Hope everyone had a restful long weekend! Or a crazy one, whatever floats your boat. 

I watched Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, and it was crazy good. But there's one tiny AI-related detail that made me feel icky (not as icky as living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, of course)... Check out Open Tabs if you want the tea.

P.S. Many of y'all loved the BruMate story in the last email, especially the actionable growth lessons. Well, there’s more where that came from — today we're pulling another gem out of the archive. Enjoy!

- Cyan

In today's email…

• 4 ways to make home improvement your big opportunity 
• An ugly website that brings in $5m a year, and the crazy lore behind it
• What we’re surfin’, from podcast advertising to a new BuzzFeed buyer

 Let's dive in!

😌 UNPLUG FROM TECH

Don’t let brain fog break you. Take the digital detox challenge to restore focus and get back to balance and bliss.

🚀 WHERE TO BUILD NEXT

Hit a home run with 4 home improvement business ideas

We previously wrote about how Americans are leaping into entrepreneurship at record rates. 

Among those who opened for business in 2023, the home services category saw the highest growth, with 278k new openings. 

From wallpapering to carpentry, those who help homeowners upgrade their abodes are pocketing millions. 

Source: Bloomberg

It’s not hard to see why. The housing market’s a mess: 

• The Fed’s been flirting with a rate cut that never seems to happen
• Young people can’t afford to move out of their parents’ basements
• Investors are buying up affordable stock 

With all this going on, homeowners (especially those who locked in a low rate during COVID) know that they’re, well, kinda stuck. So why not drop some dough to make their golden handcuffs shinier and cozier, right? 

On a more positive note, one man’s trouble is another’s pot of gold. So here are some ways to join the $884B+ home improvement gold rush: 

Renovation finance 🏦

Let’s be honest, home renovations can be a money sink. 

It’s not quite like buying another property, but you should be prepared to shell out ~$40k+ on average. You’ve also got weeks of homework to do on construction crews, contractors, materials, and pricing. 

Just promise you’ll vet your construction crew, okay? Source: Tumblr

You could provide an accounting service that helps first-time homeowners evaluate the costs related to a renovation project. Alternatively, productize that by selling an ebook on home improvement finances, or building an AI tool to do all the math in a visual, actionable way. 

The AI will ask detailed questions about the property, their goals, and figure out:

• How much money to set aside for a project
• The value added to the property post-renovation
• How often they need to do these projects (with a reminder function) 
• When to start saving up and how to allocate budget smartly

For premium features, it can even recommend pre-vetted local contractors that fit their budget and goals. 

Home improvement content

We love watching others make houses look pretty – it’s just human nature.

Whether it’s a timelapse or a step-by-step tutorial, people eat that content right up. On TikTok, DIY home improvement videos easily get views in the millions – like this video of someone hanging drywall with 51m+ views. 

If you’re in the middle of a home improvement, set up some cameras and get down to business. It could be as simple as a Loom walkthrough of finding the materials for a home gym, or videos of you building a shed, or a trapdoor (+255% YoY search volume on Houzz). 

You might also find success in a niche, like this YouTuber with 1.5m subscribers who uses Feng Shui knowledge to reset the vibe of people’s houses. 

Custom home fixtures

Speaking of vibes… Today’s consumers see their living quarters as an integral part of their emotional well-being. 

Tap into this need and specialize in mini-upgrades to cozy up a home. 

You can make and sell life quality-boosting furniture, like multipurpose furniture for small spaces, for babies and fur babies, even for gaming. 

Cuz Fido is an important part of our emotional well-being. Source: Coexiste

If you happen to be into woodworking, wooden furniture is a designer-approved comeback trend. Plus, carpentry was the second fastest growing category in the home improvement biz (+54% YoY). 

Or focus on smart home fixtures like mood lighting, digital scenting, smart locks… and set up a service to help homeowners with IoT configurations after assessing their property. 

Keep reading to see how AI tools are shaking up home design, and how you can carve out an AI interior design niche for yourself. 

📜 FROM THE ARCHIVES

He sold his biz to Bezos for $110m... then built 3 competitors

In 2022, the Trends team was trawling through the lists of top 100 sellers on Amazon, eBay, and Etsy, trying to see if anyone’s making bank selling surprising products.

Jury’s out on that one, but the search uncovered something entirely different – the crazy story of Woot and Meh. 

Background

Woot.com was an online daily deal site launched in 2003 by electronics wholesaler Matt Rutledge. The site was unique in ecommerce because it:

• Offered a single heavily discounted product each day
• Sold that product until they either ran out, or the clock struck midnight
• Wrote sales copy that was “entertainingly frank about the shortcomings of the often obsolete products sold on the site”

The internet loved it. By 2008, it had a cult following and was reportedly doing ~$164m/yr. in revenue across several product lines, with 39% YoY growth.

In 2010, Rutledge sold the company to Amazon for $110m, initially staying on to lead it. But he wasn’t happy with the way Papa Bezos mucked it up, so in 2012, with his three-year noncompete almost up, he jumped ship and started a mediocre corporation (that’s literally its name).

Today, the site gets 1.6m views/mo. per SimilarWeb., and brings in $5m in revenue.

They revived the daily deal model with a shameless reboot of Woot called Meh, and launched it with a hilarious Kickstarter. Mediocre now owns six brands, three of which follow Woot’s original daily deal model almost exactly.

Why it’s great

First of all… the chutzpah! But more importantly, there’s something cool about a business model that breaks all the rules (no FB ads, no product choices, ugly website) and still proves itself multiple times with the same founder.

Mediocre’s companies drive two main revenue streams:

• Wholesaling: They buy products in bulk from manufacturers, getting a steep volume discount, then sell those items D2C at a deal, or to retailers (who couldn’t normally buy enough to get the volume discount).
  
  
• Affiliate Deals: While Mediocre has its own warehouse, some of its deals are done as simple affiliate deals, and they don’t manage the product.

It’s not really about the discount, though 

Like Woot before it, Mediocre is a media company disguised as an ecommerce company.

Their funny voice, as well as the sense of community they foster, keep people coming back to the site day after day. The various brands flywheel each other too.

Meh shares daily stats with their community about who’s buying what (Source: Meh)

The time may be perfect to replicate this. With unprecedented inventory piling up at retailers around the world, liquidators are in higher demand than ever.

This is the perfect business for an established creator. Run it yourself, or round up a bunch of creators and make them the individual “brands” through which your company funnels daily deals.

🗂️ OPEN TABS

🎬 Mad Max: The precise casting of Furiosa was, indeed, helped by AI 

📮 From X: How Bezos thinks about decision making, via his shareholder letter

💸 Pod money: A masterclass on podcast advertising loaded with examples

🦾 Watch: 3 AI experts nerd out about LLMs (+ examples in music, self-driving cars, etc)