Flares: Peer-to-Peer Learning, Drop-Servicing Shopify, and Bamboo Plants

Shorter-form Signals based on Google, Amazon, Reddit, and other sources.

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Peer-to-Peer Learning

We recently highlighted how Greg Isenberg is building businesses by unbundling Reddit (specifically by targeting popular subreddits). One of the fastest growing subreddits has been r/Student_AcademicHelp, jumping 20x since the start of the pandemic (to ~11k subs).

With in-person school clearly in flux, peer-to-peer learning is taking off. The leader in the space is Brainly, a platform where you can pose questions to 200m+ teachers and students.

Poor reviews for Brainly suggest opportunities to offer comparable products that solve the following problems:

• Too many categories (Brainly offers support for all subjects: math, English, history, biology, chemistry, etc.)
• As community has grown, there is too much spam and moderators are too slow to take down wrong/inappropriate posts 
• Typing interface is glitchy 

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Drop Servicing and Shopify

One of our recent popular Signals was on “drop servicing”: Find a customer who needs a service, sell them that service, and then outsource the work to someone else for less, keeping the profit.

A notable opportunity in the space is around Shopify. In Q2 2020, stores on Shopify spiked +71% year-over-year (YoY). To fill the need of Shopify experts, the Canadian ecommerce company has created an expert portal that covers all types of needs, including marketing, development, and content.

According to search data from Ahrefs: 

• “Shopify experts” currently receives 5.5k searches a month with a keyword difficulty of 15 (medium)
• “Shopify developers” currently receives 1.6k searches a month but with a much more difficult keyword difficulty of 45 (hard)
  

Based on this, there’s an opportunity to position a drop service related to “Shopify expert” and working with Shopify’s existing offerings to bring together a solution (Selleo is an agency that provides such services).  

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Bamboo Plants Are Shooting Up

According to Jungle Scout, one of the fastest growing plant categories is bamboo. The brand JM Bamboo has seen search interest gain +552% over the past 30 days (on >3k searches).

The two product types popular in the category are bamboo bundles and pre-potted bamboo. Surprisingly, there is not a lot of competition in the space. Based on 1- and 2-star reviews, opportunities may be in ensuring fresh bamboo stocks (many arrived yellow and dying) or better packaging (which helps preserve the condition of the plants).

Dig deeper: If you’re interested in rolling out a plant-based business, don’t miss our new report on Window Garden, a $2m business built on the back of a Kickstarter campaign. In the report, you’ll learn how to:

• Run a Kickstarter
• Compete on Amazon
• Build a social community around your product