The Signal: The best Signal ideas often come from a single sentence buried in a report that other people have overlooked. Like this example, taken from our newly revamped Trends Small Business Database:
“Not many people want a career as a florist. The talent pool is shrinking fast. So we have to find those with passion and teach them.”
With insights from hundreds of companies, the SMB Database offers founders’ thoughts on challenges, needs, and opportunities inside dozens of industries. In this signal, we’ll show you 3 ways to use the database to find and vet interesting business ideas.
Uncovering Challenges: Each entry in the Trends SMB database answers several questions. Among them: “What is the biggest challenge founders in your industry face?” This question is specifically designed to uncover potential business opportunities.
In the example above, Henock Tesfaw, owner of Bloomtastic, a florist doing $1.1m in annual sales with a 25% margin, reports that it’s hard for florists to find talent.
There are 32k+ florist shops in the US (more than 2x the number of McDonalds) and 6.5k+ people search for “Florist Jobs” on Google each month, according to Keywords Everywhere. Indeed has 300+ florist jobs posted, yet there is no central hub for people in the floral industry to find or post jobs. There could be an opportunity to connect these 2 groups.
Verifying Needs: Our database allows you to examine several businesses in the same industry, which can help you tease out patterns. In this case, by searching for “flower” in the search bar, we find another florist called BJ’s Petal Pushers.
In describing what they wish they’d spent money on sooner -- another question we ask every business operator who shares their information -- BJ’s Petal Pushers said “Hiring faster.”
Those examples suggest that hiring is an important challenge for many florists, and that they may be willing to spend money to make it easier.
Learning By Example: The SMB database can also help you find other businesses to learn from. If you’re interested in helping florists hire, but you’re not sure where to start, use the filters at the top of the database to search for other companies in the staffing and recruiting space.
This search reveals a multimillion-dollar company called GreenForce, which specializes in staffing for the cannabis industry (florist-adjacent). They could be a great model to learn from.
Today, Greenforce is a $5m company with 100 employees and 30% margins. But if you dig into their company a little more (we used archive.org’s Wayback machine), you’ll see that they started out as a simple job board. (For more specific info on job boards, check out our deep dive on the business.)
Big Picture: This is just one business idea that came from a single insight in the Trends SMB Database. If you’re willing to put in the time, you can find thousands more ideas -- with new entries coming regularly. Here are a few more gems we uncovered:
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