3 Things: Best of/I am Moving Edition 🤣
Happy Sunday and a very warm welcome to all the new subscribers! I’m thrilled and honored to have you as readers and truly appreciate your thoughts and feedback 🙏. I’ve unfortunately had to spend this entire weekend moving (and it was somewhat unexpected) and still don’t have wifi so this edition will bring back 3 of the most popular “things” from previous newsletters. We have a ton of new subscribers so great chance to resurface the ideas that the community has been most excited about. It’s always interesting for me because sometimes ideas that I’m extremely excited about get little response and weeks when I feel like the ideas are weak, I get a ton of positive feedback ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Three of the most popular ideas of all time have been:
Startup Saas Bundle
Coffee Bombs
Subscription Running Shoes
1. Startup SaaS Bundle
The last decade has been the great unbundling of SaaS, with the average startup now purchasing more than 34 independent SaaS products to run their business. What used to be wrapped up under the umbrella of SAP or Oracle has now been split into hundreds of best-in-class point solutions that startups have opted for. When you start a company, you’re immediately confronted with dozens of tool choices (there are literally a dozen solely for back-office stuff that I previously wrote about in The Ultimate Back Office Guide for Startups). On top of mere analysis paralysis, there are certain considerations that you need to take into account such as cost, compatibility with other products, feature functionality, etc, that requires a tremendous amount of research, hair-pulling, and ultimately decision making. I’ve been making a joke for years that no one else seems to find funny saying “BRING BACK SAP!!” What I’m really trying to say is I welcome the day when there is a bundle that is good enough; a platform that shares the same login, UI/UX, and has 80% of the functionality that a customer could ever ask for.
The honest truth is that most of the software that a startup needs to operate is somewhat commoditized at this point. Don’t need all the functionality of Salesforce (or want to pay the eye-popping sticker price)? There are dozens of cheaper, lightweight CRMs that will serve your needs just fine. Realistically there are about 10 core pieces of software that you’re going to need. This will vary slightly for B2B vs. B2C but for now I’ll focus on B2B. Your stack will look something like this:
GSuite or Office 365 or both (not proposing someone tries to reinvent this… better to just build out of the box integrations)
Team Communication (likely this is Slack and Zoom)
Payroll/HR System
Accounting software
Applicant Tracking System (ATS)
Customer Relationship Management tool (CRM)
Marketing Automation software (email sending tool)
Project Management tool
Issue Tracking software
Customer Support/Helpdesk
There are likely many other tools that individual companies will want for things like onboarding, spend management, code deployment/management and other niche use cases, so I don’t expect that one offering could provide literally everything. I do think that a company can follow the Pareto principle and build the 80% of functionality that everyone needs for each of the tools above and bundle it into a single unified platform. There are always cycles of bundling and unbundling and I think we’ve hit peak unbundling and it’s time for someone to take a crack at bundling the startup stack. I’d specifically target startups initially as it’s unlikely that a more mature company would be willing to rip and replace many of their core business systems at once. Startups however, are often starting from a clean slate and have to research and purchase their entire stack at once (or close to it) so there is an opportunity to catch companies in this stage and provide them with everything they need for the first few years. As time goes on you could upgrade each of the core systems to add more enterprise features and grow with the customer base.
2. Coffee Bombs
Hear me out on this one… imagine the concept of bath bombs but for your coffee or tea. This started out as an exploration into functional beverages which add herbs, vitamins, minerals, nootropics, amino acids, etc to beverages to convey additional health benefits to the consumer. Recently, I’ve started adding spices like cinnamon and cayenne, or turmeric and ginger to almond milk and using it as coffee creamer. It is delicious but also adds the benefits of boosting metabolism (cayenne), controlling blood sugar (cinnamon), or reducing inflammation (turmeric). The trend began with performance enhancing drinks like sports drinks or energy drinks but has slowly matured into more health-focused niches as well. Depending on what you classify as a functional beverage, studies peg the market size somewhere between ~$60B and $200B currently and functional drinks make up nearly half of all non-alcoholic beverages.
So what does this have to do with bath bombs?? Well, in diving into the world of functional beverages, it came to my attention that there are nearly no functional milk/alternative milk products on the market (outside of those with extra vitamin D or calcium). Combine this with my fascination for molecular gastronomy, I wanted to see if it would be possible to use spherification techniques to create pearls or larger “bombs” of spice-enhanced milk which could be added to coffee or tea. The idea here is to bring both experiential elements to the coffee/tea drinking experience while also adding health-boosting spices based on personal needs. You’d get a cool looking jar of spheres based on what health benefits you’re looking for and your milk preference, and you add your desired amount to your drink where it melts and becomes a delicious functional beverage. Spherification kit has been ordered and we’ll see how this experiment goes!
Edit… below is how the spherification went! And picture above is the “bombs”. TBH, the small pearls were really cool but was essentially boba for coffee which was a texture thing I couldn’t get over. I much preferred the bombs that fizzed and disappeared into the coffee.
3. Subscription Running Shoes
I’ve been an avid runner since high school and have always been told the rule that you’re supposed to replace your shoes every 300-500 miles, but who can remember when you bought your last pair or track how many miles you’ve gone in each? Waiting too long to replace shoes can significantly increase risk of injury, cause more impact on your joints, and generally put more strain on your body. With the rise of wearables and health apps (pre-installed on mobile devices or athlete-focused apps like Strava, Runkeeper, MyFitnessPal) 1 out of every 5 adults in the US now uses either a wearable or health tracker and likely every serious athlete or health-conscious person. These devices and apps should give you all the data you need to know when to replace your shoes if it’s leveraged in the right way.
Most runners that I know have a specific brand and model of shoes that are their go-tos. Whether you like Nike, Adidas, Hoka, Saucony, or Brooks; whether you pronate, supinate or are a neutral runner; when you find something that works for you, you stick with it. I’m a Brooks Adrenaline AA gal myself :) Shoe companies create new models each year and end up selling their excess inventory at a steep discount or through discount shoe retail sites. Even if you only run or walk an average of 3 miles per day you’re looking at changing your shoes every 4-5 months. For people who go closer to 10 miles per day, that’s a 1-2 month lifespan per pair of shoes. A company could offer a subscription service that partners with all major running shoe brands and provides consumers with a subscription to their shoe of choice. It would tie into data from your wearable or fitness app to automatically order shoes when you hit 300 miles (or whatever marker you set) kind of like what Bottomless does for coffee. They could buy up the excess inventory from the running companies at a reasonable discount and offer consumers a slight discount on the sticker price and then pocket the difference. Once you have a critical mass of consumers there are a whole variety of upsell/cross-sell opportunities given the demographic is specific but also large enough to build a sizable business.
That’s all for today and next week we will be back to regularly scheduled programming! If you have thoughts, comments, or want to get in touch, find me on Twitter at @ezelby and if you enjoyed this, please share with a friend or two!
~ Elaine