3 Things: Sleep-as-a-Service, Rare Earth Element Marketplace, DIY Home Improvement Subscription
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 🙏. Each edition of 3 Things will contain a dive into 3 rabbit holes I’ve found myself going down recently. Subscribe to get each week’s edition straight to your inbox and if you enjoy it, please share (I suck at self-promotions so can use your help)! This past week I’ve been thinking a lot about:
Sleep-as-a-Service
Marketplace for Rare Earth Elements
DIY Home Improvement Subscription
1. Sleep-as-a-Service
We spend nearly 1/3 of our lives sleeping. It’s one of the most important things we can do for our physical and mental health and finally, sleeping 8 hours a night is cool. Sleep has implications on everything from our weight, productivity, performance, social interactions, inflammation, and proclivity for heart disease, stroke, or Type 2 diabetes. While it used to be trendy to boast about only needing 4 hours of sleep per night, we’ve now woken up (pun intended) to the importance of a good night’s rest and startups are cropping up to tackle all aspects of sleep. In 2020 alone, over $600M of venture funding went into the business of sleep and companies across every category imaginable are building products and services trying to solve a problem plaguing 70% of Americans.
There are mattress companies like Eight Sleep that offers a consumer smart mattress meant to optimize sleep through collecting data and personalizing temperature settings or Bryte which sells a hospitality solution for luxury resorts to help patrons achieve more restorative sleep. Over $70B are spent each year on sleep aids in an attempt to get some quality shuteye and a handful of companies now provide customized subscription sleep aid products such as Remrise and Proper. There are weighted blankets like Gravity Blanket and Bearaby, meditation apps whose real “job to be done” is sleep like Calm and Headspace, and even wearables like Cove, Oura, and Muse. Navigating all of these solutions and figuring out what will work best for you is overwhelming, yet people are willing to pay big $$ and use numerous products to get better sleep. There is an opportunity for a sleep navigation startup to help act as a sleep concierge and create personalized plans, bundles, and programs to help each individual achieve optimal sleep. Consumers get matched with a personal sleep consultant, do a series of at-home tests and surveys, and get a personalized subscription that may include a variety of supplements, wearables, apps, mattress and more. The startup would monetize by taking a percentage of each sale as an affiliate/channel partner and also charge an upfront consultation fee. Because most of these products are subscription, you’d still end up earning recurring revenue. Eventually, you could start to create your own products in house and sell those directly.
2. Marketplace for Rare Earth Elements
Neodymium, dysprosium, and lanthanum might sound like made up terms from a Marvel film, but in fact they are a few of the rare earth elements used in common consumer electronics like smartphones, TVs, batteries (including for electric vehicles), speakers, cameras, magnets, LEDs, and more. These metals are valued for their unique properties including high heat resistance, strong magnetism, high electrical conductivity, and high luster. Some primary uses for REEs are in screens and lights to create phosphors (substances that emit luminescence), as catalysts for petroleum refining, and as a critical component in batteries, magnets, and steel alloys. As more of our world is made of components and devices that require rare earth elements, the already large demand for these substances is expected to continue to increase.
While they are called “rare” earth elements, many of these elements are not particularly rare at all, but are found in extremely low concentrations and require difficult and expensive processes to extract, separate, and purify these metals. The majority of these metals are mined today in China with Australia, Brazil, India, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Russia, South Africa, and the US also producing sizeable amounts. In addition to REEs, many other products that make our world run also require small amounts of other elements such as cobalt (primarily mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo) and lithium (primarily mined in Chile) which are essential for batteries. As these elements are mined, refined, and processed all over the world, a marketplace can act as the intermediary between supply and demand. Similar to how companies like ChemDirect and Mickey act as marketplaces for chemicals and commodities (starting with forest products) respectively, this platform would focus on deeply understanding the needs of the rare earth element market including the trade routes and the major players, and add technology to provide seamless discovery, ordering, payments, and more to the market.
3. DIY Home Improvement Subscription
There are now over 20 million people in the r/DIY subreddit (and an additional 2.3 million in r/HomeImprovement), DIY influencers across all social media channels, and 120+ billion views of #DIY videos on TikTok. After 18 months of staying mostly at home, many people started doing DIY projects from crafts to home improvement to pass the time and also make their home and work environments more pleasant and representative of their unique selves. Home remodeling related searches have doubled over the past year, Home Depot did $41B in revenue last quarter, and the home improvement market is now over $760B per year. As many have moved into larger spaces and plan to continue working fom home at least some of the time, the DIY hobby is likely to continue.
Traditionally, DIY projects involved going to your local hardware or craft store and doing research online to find instructions, but in the age of the internet, e-commerce, and social media, there is perfect opportunity to create a subscription service that sends consumers monthly DIY home improvement projects. Partner with DIY influencers and leverage the myriad lists of projects to create a variety of kits that are sent with all of the requisite materials and instructions. Get users to send in photos and videos of their finished products and leverage the UGC (user generated content) to attract new subscribers. It’s a great opportunity to create fun ads on Instagram and TikTok to drive subscriptions and also leverage any trending memes, viral hashtags, or seasonal concepts and create kits around them. There is also an opportunity to allow users to submit their own ideas or even create their own kits and sell through a marketplace.
That’s all for today! 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
Elaine, I've been a very happy subscriber to your outstanding newsletter for a few weeks now, and you never fail to surprise me with excellent and well-researched ideas and concepts. They get better and more interesting every week and it's even more impressive to know that you have a demanding full-time job and a brand new baby to boot.
Part of the reason for my comment is to thank you for the high-quality effort you put into this every week and the second is that there happen to be few 'answers' to your ideas this week. They are not precisely what you describe, but they represent approximately 80% of the solutions you outline:
1) Sleep-as-a-Service = https://apnix.com/
2) Marketplace for Rare Earth Elements = https://metalnetworks.ai/
3) DIY Home Improvement Subscription = https://www.instructables.com/
My sincere hope is that you continue writing and might I suggest listing all of your ideas in a database (maybe Airtable or Notion) that others can add their comments and companies they discover to respond to your concepts. Thanks again.