3 Things: Universal Cookie Settings Plugin, Surf 'n Turf Competition, Tinder for Parents
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-promotion so can use your help)! This past week I’ve been thinking a lot about:
Universal Cookies Setting Plugin
Surf ‘n Turf Competition
Tinder for Parents
1. Universal Cookie Settings Plugin
There is a famous phrase in Silicon Valley that “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product”, meaning that you are providing the app or company with valuable data that they turn around and sell to advertisers or other 3rd parties. While there have been numerous “Do Not Track” conversations going back to 2009, major changes came about after 2016 when the European Union adopted GDPR or the General Data Protection Regulation aimed at enhancing individuals' control and rights over their personal data and simplifying the regulatory environment for international businesses. The regulation became enforceable in 2018 and with it, every business and website had to scramble and figure out how to comply. Shortly after, California passed it’s own set of regulations that took it one step further called CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) which gives consumers the right to know what data is being collected, the right to have it deleted, and the right to request that their data not be sold. The compliance solution, for the most part, has been those insanely annoying (the most common term I hear is “infuriating”) popups that you see on literally every website asking for you to accept cookies or select your specific tracking preferences.
The first time you visit a website on your computer or phone, you will be greeted with a version of that infuriating popup and each popup is different, making it both confusing for the consumer and challenging to actually figure out what is being tracked and how your data is being used. Generally, individuals have a specific opinion about their data collection/usage and want it applied universally across all websites they visit. I would happily install a Chrome extension that gives a 3rd party company access to my entire browsing history (the irony, I know!) whose purpose is to autofill my cookie preferences on every single one of those popups. The popups are javascript that is rendered after you hit a website and it assesses whether you are a new visitor or not, so the solution needs to be a Chrome extension that can see when the popup is rendered and then immediately navigate the unique widget to select your pre-approved preferences. Since the extension would acquire the data of all people who install the plugin, it would be extremely easy to turn around and monetize the anonymized data, especially given how hard it is for companies to get access to 1st party data now given new anti-tracking measures such as Apple’s iOS 14.5 updates.
2. Surf ‘n Turf Competition
Aside from maybe snowboarding and pickleball, there haven’t been many new sports that have gained popularity over the last few decades. Americans love their sports, and a passionate subset (myself very much included!) are absolutely obsessed with endurance and adventure sports and competitions. From Tough Mudder, Spartan Race, and Ragnar (who collectively have over 18 million participants across thousands of global races) to 100-mile running races like Western States and Ironman Triathlons — it’s clear that the market for crazy stuff like this exists and continues to grow. Years ago, I participated in the now defunct Men’s Health Magazine Urbanathlon which was a 10-12 mile race and obstacle course that involved things like climbing over buses using nets, navigating stacks and stacks of pallets, and much more as you run from obstacle to obstacle.
On top of the participant market, there is a massive cohort of people who like to watch crazy races and events. When you look at the observer market, there have been numerous TV hits that cater to our obsession with strength and endurance. Examples include American Ninja Warrior, which has run for 13 seasons with an average of 6 million viewers per episode, The Amazing Race (which is currently on Season 33!!) and The World’s Toughest Race which documented the Eco Challenge. I think there is an opportunity to create a new type of adventure race/competition that combines water and land. Call it “Surf ‘n Turf” and have a variety of obstacles and challenges that a racer must complete and at the end, culminate in a fancy surf ‘n turf feast. Most races provide crappy snacks and maybe a beer at the end so you could differentiate by making the meal at the end as appealing as the main event and attract both casual and competitive racers alike. You’d be able to charge an extremely high price point by focusing on the food and party at the end and could offer a fun and accessible version similar to WipeOut Run as well as an extremely intense version more akin to a Spartan race.
3. Tinder For Parents
Match Group, which was started all the way back in 1986, owns pretty much every dating app you’ve ever heard of. They have built or acquired 45 in total with over 9 million subscribers and did $2.4B in revenue in 2020. Apps like Tinder, Hinge, OurTime, OKCupid, and PlentyofFish are all under the Match umbrella. You’d think that an app whose sole goal is to get you off the app wouldn’t be a good business, but that is clearly not the case. In 2016, Bumble saw the demand for a matching service focused on non-romantic partners and launched Bumble BFF for finding friends and then Bumble for Bizz focused on professional networking in 2017. While I don’t believe either have been particularly successful, I think they correctly identified technology’s ability to help people find more than just a spouse or intimate relationships. Their focus was too broad and ended up migrating towards the lowest common denominator to serve the most people and use cases.
Just like the desperation people feel when trying to find a mate or new best friend, new parents (mom’s in particular) frantically search for other new parents who live in close proximity and have a baby of similar age. There are numerous facebook groups that you can join for this purpose but they are *extremely* noisy and while they might be helpful for advice or to sell/gift your old baby gear, they’re not actually a good place to make friends who you will spend time with. Making friends as an adult is hard enough as is (especially for men)… and add in 2 years of Covid where everyone was isolated plus a baby and now you have a real challenge on your hands. For parents who work, you have such limited time to spend with others so optimizing for quickly finding people who share similar interests is also critical. Given how similar all dating apps end up being, you could clone an existing app and tailor it to narrowly focus on new parents. People are willing to pay for dating apps’ premium features and I imagine new parents would be as well. There are tons of adjacent add-on opportunities from carving off the giant portion of Facebook Marketplace that is focused on baby gear to creating events and meetups for parents to offering birthday services and even selling products directly from brands.
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