The Hustle - 🏝️ A $12B honeymoon for ME

Happy Trends Tuesday!

This isn't surprising, but 100% of y'all who responded to our survey last week said you wanted more stories around the cannabis biz.

So today we're bringing you the growth lessons from the early days of CANN, a cannabis-infused drink brand that's projected to bring in ~$36m in revenue this year. 

In today's email…

• Opportunities in the rise of "MeMooners"
• How to bring difficult product to market — the CANN story
• What we’re surfin’, from fintech in the AI age to a viral plush toy

Let's dive in! 

🔑 A $10M COPYWRITING CRASH COURSE

For that Midas-like touch for telling stories, steal strats from two of the best. The My First Million Copywriting Kit has a whole library of frameworks and tools by Sam, Shaan, and us here at HubSpot.

🚀 WHERE TO BUILD NEXT

Hilton recently released their 2025 travel trend report, surveying 13k+ travelers across 13 countries. 

The researcher in me is pretty pumped about this, so I’ll be sharing some interesting tidbits from the report, and business opportunities from these trends — in two parts. 

Part 1. WTF do you mean, “Frolleague” and “MeMooner” ?

Thought I had a stroke when I first read these words, but they’re actually pretty simple in meaning. 

• Frolleague: Friends who are also colleagues
• MeMooner: People who take themselves on vacation like they would a honeymoon 

Today, 29% of global travelers are going on leisure trips with frolleagues, a number that Hilton predicts will grow in 2025. And 25% are planning to tag on more fun times around their team building retreats (which are also on the rise). 

Coworkers didn’t use to rank high on the travel buddies list, but times have changed. 

It’s hard enough for adults to make friends these days. If we’re going to exclude coworkers — folks that we spend ~30% of our time every week with — who’s left? 

Source: Sherwood News

Already, we see opportunities to build better products that help people:

• Find new friends more easily
• Split bills or collaborate on travel planning with frolleagues
• Plan more meaningful team building activities 

But the real moneymaker lies in “memooners,” or solo travelers (those who aren’t about to settle for workplace BFFs just yet 😅). 

The term may be new, but the sentiment has always been there. In fact, nearly half of global travelers often go it alone (55% for Gen Z, 51% for Millennials). 

There’s also a subreddit dedicated to it with 4m subscribers, which grew ~1.5x since we covered the topic a year ago. 

Source: Google Trends, six-month rolling average

So let’s revisit some of our best solo travel-related business ideas: 

Customized tours

Solo travelers can still crave community, and an astonishing 90% join tours to find it. But traditional tours may not suit those seeking peace of mind or a safe space to self-explore. 

The tours and activities sector is expected to hit ~$300B by 2025. You can tap into this market and design personalized tours and itineraries that match solo travelers of similar preferences. 

Niche down and build tours for groups with more specific needs, such as:

• LGBTQ+ history tours (and other demographic tours) 
• Neurodivergent group tours
• Breakup tours (59% of divorcees are ready for a solo vacay in 2023)
• Grief tours 

AI travel buddy

Solo exploring is a great opportunity to learn about a location’s history, culture, and more. Autio, an audio app that narrates location-relevant stories for travelers, raised $5.9m last year. 

As AI chatbot apps get millions in funding, entrepreneurs could build an AI companion/guide that breaks down these learnings into conversational snippets for solo travelers. 

The AI can chat with travelers day and night via messages, like texts from a real friend. Other things it could do: 

📍 Give personalized recommendations of local spots to visit.

🎏 Notify users of events and festivals happening around the area.

🦄 Tell stories about local myths and legends.

Social trends, pets, and more

Keep reading to see more opportunities in the “memooner” trend, such as leaning into (or against) social media, and simplifying travel for pets — after all, 25% of solo travelers are bringing their fur babies along for the ride. 

And don’t forget to come back next week for part two, where we break down business ideas in “hurkle-durkling.” 

⚙️ OPERATOR WISDOM

Bringing Difficult Products to Market: Lessons from CANN 

Building any company is hard, but it’s especially challenging for those in the so-called vice industries like cannabis, which face extra obstacles in:

• Early adoption of products consumers aren’t familiar with
• Winning shelf space in competitive or highly regulated markets
• Scaling distribution without access to traditional channels

There’s a lot to learn from how they overcome these challenges. 

The Trends team sat down with Codie Sanchez, managing director at Entourage Effect Capital (one of the first VCs in the cannabis industry), to uncover the lessons and takeaways any business owner can use.

1. Early Adoption

CANN is a THC-infused cannabis drink positioned as a cocktail alternative that Sanchez invested in.

When CANN launched, they faced 2 key product challenges which innovators in other industries will recognize:

• The idea of a cannabis drink was unusual to most consumers who were used to smokable or edible products.
  
  
• Though legal, their product was barred from advertising on platforms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon.

CANN had to invent a market where there wasn’t one, and do it without access to the most powerful ad platforms in the world. 

Source: CANN website

They started by investing in a visual brand that was fun, approachable, and socially relevant, then used a creative approach to win celebrity endorsements.

“They did a ton of cross-promos,” Sanchez said, partnering with the coolest brands in cannabis to make highly customized gift bags and shipping them to celebrities.

Celeb investors include Gwyneth Paltrow, Rosario Dawson, and Casey Neistat. 

The big takeaway: Getting the attention of influencers is hard, but can more than make up for a lack of traditional advertising. Stand out and multiply your power by partnering with other brands in your industry who are facing the same challenges you are.

2. Winning Shelf Space

Having celebrity investors is only useful if customers can actually buy your product somewhere. While landing shelf space is always hard, it’s especially difficult in the cannabis industry, where:

• There’s a limited amount of shelf space to begin with, since many brands must sell through a small number of licensed dispensaries.
  
  
• Some products offer way more profit per square foot than others, making dispensaries slow to adopt new offerings.

For example, you could fit ~$100k worth of cannabis distillates on a shelf the size of a MacBook computer, Sanchez told us. That same shelf space would hold ~$50 worth of CANN drinks.

So CANN was battling for space with companies that could drive way more revenue for dispensaries in the same square footage.

Their secret: They mastered the art of the pop-up event.

The founders would convince a dispensary to let them host a pop-up, and put tons of energy into creating a fun experience that brought new customers to the store. When owners saw how enthusiastic people were about CANN, they were more likely to offer up shelf space to keep buyers coming back.

Source: Tenor

The big takeaway: A low-cost product that brings customers in the door is better than a high-cost product that sits on the shelf. Show (don’t tell) retailers that you’re a customer magnet, and they’ll be slow to turn you down. 

3. Scaling Distribution

Like everything else in the cannabis world, distribution is a challenge.

Companies aren’t allowed to ship using FedEx, UPS, or other traditional carriers, and face a bevy of licensing, labeling, and testing laws (check out the Flares below for opportunities in this space).

Most solve this by partnering with licensed distributors in the cannabis space. CANN, for instance, signed a deal with Green Thumb Industries to get their drink into the hands of new customers.

But Urbn Leaf, a chain of dispensaries in Sanchez’s portfolio, went about it in a different way.

In addition to shipping their product to the people, they also decided to ship people to the product.

Urbn Leaf launched a fleet of branded buses that offer free rides to and from the dispensary, stopping off at popular beach towns and senior care facilities, solving the problem of marketing and distribution in one fell swoop.

The big takeaway: No matter what obstacle you’re facing, inverting the problem offers creative new solutions. As James Clear says: “[The] innovators who stand out are often the ones who overturn the standard in a compelling way.”

🗂️ OPEN TABS

📊 Analysis: Where the fintech sector goes next in the age of AI

🧗 From X: A hardcore business builder's journey, in numbers

🎧 Listen: This tiny product is making a big splash on TikTok

🧸 Obsession: These viral plush toys brought in $57m in 2022 — here's how.