Two business opportunities you can validate in less than a week

Hey! I post regularly about product ideas, trends, and opportunities. I made a previous post like this and got positive responses so I thought it would make sense to post another one. You can find all the ideas I wrote about in the past here.

Opportunity 1: Unbundling Reddit

Yes, I know that the unbundling of Reddit is an old hat. So I’ll skip the preamble and talk directly about an example and a concrete opportunity.

Let’s start with an example I came across five minutes ago.

• r/ClubhouseInvites is a subreddit dedicated to the trading of invites to the now viral social audio platform Clubhouse. (I’m not bullish, in case you wondered.) The community already has 2.1k members and its creator was smart enough to create a dedicated website. He claims that he’s sold already more than 700+ invites at $30 a piece. Even crazier, just four days ago he was able to sell the website for $9,450 on Flippa. (h/t Stefan von Imhof.) While there are many lessons here, the guy who started the community clearly followed the steps in the Unbundling of Reddit Playbook in record speed and was able to make a nice profit.

So looking for exploding subreddits you can turn into a standalone platform is a great strategy. Here’s one opportunity I discovered this way.

• The idea behind r/SurveyExchange is that you can post your survey for others to fill out and fill one of theirs in return. So like r/ClubhouseInvites it’s a marketplace and the subreddit is only a rather awkward workaround. If someone would create a dedicated platform, I’m sure it would find plenty of users in record time. After all, here’s what the subreddits growth chart looks like.

Opportunity 2: Better Recommendations

I find it incredibly frustrating to search for book recommendations. Often times, I have to add a faux-query modifiers like “reddit” to find any useful discussion on Google.

GoodReads calls itself "the world’s largest site for readers and book recommendations." However, the data provided is usually not very useful and the recommendations far from optimal. Most of the time, you'll only find dozens of list that tell you to read "Harry Potter" or some other book you already know about. Since it's primarily a popularity contest and most users have an entry-level taste, it's almost impossible to discover hidden gems or niche books on GoodReads.

So here’s an idea I had:

• Use GoodReads bookshelves to match people with similar taste. Let’s say we find that Person A and Person B have almost exactly the same taste.

• Then instead of recommending the most popular book Person A has on his bookshelf that Person B hasn’t, recommend the book from Person A’s shelf that almost no one has heard about.

Person B is already perfectly aware of all the popular books Person A has read. So there is no point in recommending it to him.

For example, if both are into entrepreneurship it makes little sense to recommend “Tools of Titans” to Person B since chances are high that he’s already aware of its existence.

I’m definitely into entrepreneurship and aware of “Tools of Titans” existence. But still, I’ll never read it no matter who recommends it to me. I made that decision a long time ago and see no reason to re-evaluate it.

Instead, we should recommend books with the highest probability that Person B hasn’t heard of it yet.

Each time someone I follow on Twitter recommends a book I’ve never heard of before, I immediately become curious. That’s the stuff I’m here for! In contrast, I have zero interest in yet another recommendation of Taleb’s Antifragile.

Since we’ve established previously that Person A and Person B have a similar taste, chances are high that he too will like the book even if it isn’t wildly popular.

This would be an amazing way to bring hidden gems to the surface.