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Battle of the Business Ideas
Battle of the Business Ideas | Trends by The Hustle

Here at Trends, our analysts have access to all kinds of cool tools to help us vet businesses. This week, we thought we’d use them to assess your business ideas.

So we’ve come up with a little game in which we draw 3 business ideas from the Trends Facebook group and use data to see how they measure up.

The rules are simple: We use 3 metrics to evaluate the 3 business ideas, showing which idea fares best according to each metric.

The Influencer Strategy that Cut My Acquisition Costs by 40%
The Influencer Strategy that Cut My Acquisition Costs by 40% | Trends by The Hustle

This week’s Strategy Corner is a guest post from Nik Sharma, who’s led D2C growth for major brands like Hint (flavored water) and VaynerMedia. Today he runs Sharma Brands, where he’s worked with everyone from Hydrant to Vox Media to Cher on branding and D2C strategy. 

For more from him, check out his Trends lecture on how to launch a D2C product — or check out his D2C marketing newsletter.

Enter Nik…

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The Smartest Acquisition Strategies of All Time
The Smartest Acquisition Strategies of All Time | Trends by The Hustle

“What is the most clever customer acquisition strategy you’ve ever seen?,” investor Patrick OShaughnessy asked the Twitter-verse recently. 

The tweet racked up hundreds of responses, and was featured in last week’s Tips and Tools. In this week’s Strategy Corner, we dive into lessons learned from 3 of our favorites.

1) Tinder: Go after the toughest users first

In an interview with TechCrunch, Justin Mateen, founder and former CMO of Tinder, said, “Go after the hardest users to get first… These can either be your worst critics or your greatest evangelists.”

Curiosity May Have Killed the Cat, But It’ll Grow Your Business Like Crazy
Curiosity May Have Killed the Cat, But It’ll Grow Your Business Like Crazy | Trends by The Hustle

When it comes to growing a business, our guy Sam Parr is a bit of a coyote trickster. He’s a benevolent troublemaker whose tactics are reminiscent of showmen like P.T. Barnum, Ben Franklin, and others. For example:

  • The marketing for Southern Sam’s, his chain of hot-dog carts that sold “weiners as big as a baby’s arm.”
  • Early Hustle stories published under pen names like Steve Garcia, Sid Finch, and Steph Whitfield to make the team seem bigger.
  • A Black Friday sale made to look like a leaked internal email sold hundreds of thousands of dollars in Trends subscriptions in a few days.

Sam doesn’t take himself too seriously. Most of the time, his stunts are driven by his sense of humor and a desire to entertain.

Keys to High-Growth Twitter Threads
Keys to High-Growth Twitter Threads | Trends by The Hustle

If you go viral once on Twitter, you’re lucky. Twice? You’re good. Over the last month, The Hustle’s Alex Garcia has written tweet threads that have gone viral again, and again, and again.

In a recent experiment, he shared 1 thread per day for 50 days, each with marketing lessons from famous brands like Airbnb or PayPal.

Stats from Garcia’s Twitter dashboard

The threads have been wildly popular, racking up hundreds of retweets, thousands of likes, and growing his following from ~5k to 27k+ in 28 days.

Bringing Difficult Products to Market: Lessons from Cannabis Brands
Bringing Difficult Products to Market: Lessons from Cannabis Brands | Trends by The Hustle

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:

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

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

The Hidden Innovators of the Exponential Age
The Hidden Innovators of the Exponential Age | Trends by The Hustle

When we talk about innovation, it’s common to talk about the same few subjects. Trillion-dollar tech companies or large-scale projects like Bitcoin get tons of media attention.

But the Trends community is all about finding hidden change — seeing the things that others overlook. 

So we sat down with Azeem Azhar — founder of the Exponential View newsletter and podcast — and asked: Who are the innovators that no one is talking about today but everyone will know in 10 years? 

The Power of Emotional Contrast in Marketing
The Power of Emotional Contrast in Marketing | Trends by The Hustle

The average supermarket carries ~47k products, many of which compete against each other for your attention. To survive, great CPG brands must master the art of standing out.

Trendster Jordan Michael Schuster is the founder of Snacktually, a business development agency specializing in the CPG space that’s helped launch $100m+ worth of products in the last 5 years.

His secret to marketing? One word: Contrast.

The Tools Behind a 7-Figure Newsletter
The Tools Behind a 7-Figure Newsletter | Trends by The Hustle

So, you wanna start a newsletter?

If you’re like most prospective founders we talked to while researching the Trends Newsletter Guide, then one of your first questions is, “What tools should I use to build it?”

Today we’re dipping into our research to break down newsletter tech and show you:

  • The 5 key tools newsletter businesses rely on.
  • The most important question you need to answer when choosing newsletter tech.
  • The software used by famous newsletters like Morning Brew, The Hustle, and more.

The combination of tools you use is called your “technical stack”… 

The Lucrative Business of Review Sites
The Lucrative Business of Review Sites | Trends by The Hustle

Trendster Cooper Mitchell owns Garage Gym Reviews

Key Takeaways

  • The product review industry has undergone significant change since OG Consumer Reports released its first print issue 85 years ago. The internet, affiliate marketing, and Google Search have played profound roles in reshaping the business.
  • New trends in ecommerce, consumer online behavior, and influencer marketing are opening doors to new opportunities, with many companies making millions of dollars a year in the space.
  • One testament to its growth: BestReviews was recently sold for $160m — $50m more than its purchase price in 2018.
  • Amazon is the largest affiliate network. However, it has been consistently cutting commission rates, leading successful reviewers to forge new affiliate paths.
  • We identified more than a dozen opportunities by evaluating the impact of new acquisition channels on existing high-performing affiliate products and uncovering new product opportunities in reliable distribution channels.
  • Focusing on the one thing all consumers want will give new sites an edge.

Introduction

“People don’t want a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!” That’s what Harvard professor Theodore Levitt used to say. But as HBS students Momchil Filev and Ben Faw figured out, many people are actually looking for the best drill. 

Filev and Faw were wrapping up their MBAs at Harvard in 2014 and saw an opportunity to capitalize on the $40B of products that are returned each year by consumers who aren’t happy with a purchase.