Finding Your City, Jiu Jitsu, Personality Tests

Welcome to Biz Brainstorms –

My name's Connor, I'm the author of this newsletter. Every week I'll send you an email covering ideas, lessons & tools to help you start or grow your business.

Today's Outline:

• Picking Your City 🏙

• Jiu Jitsu Ice Packs 🥋

• Personality Tests 🔮

• Redbull co-founder 💸

📚 1 Business Lesson:

For the first time ever you can earn a Manhattan salary living in Phucket Thailand.

There are obvious wins from remote work that I won't go into today.

But, as someone who is early to their career, this kid-in-a-candy-shop choice of "Where Should I Live?" comes with an unexpected consequence that I don't think is commonly talked about.

The city you live in plays a serious role in how your career progresses.

Depending on what your goal is, I don't believe the remote culture work environment we have today is as conducive for career growth as being in the right place surrounded by the right people.

Paul Graham said it well:

"Most unusual ambitions fail unless the person who has them manages to find the right community."

It's true that you can live and work anywhere. But if you have serious ambition to be the best in your craft, being in the right physical location is still important today.

• Building a Fin Tech project? Go to NYC.

• Building a career as a content creator? Go to Austin or LA.

• Building a Web3 project? Go to Miami.

And I'm not saying it's required.

Mr. Beast, arguably the biggest internet creator, still lives in Greenville, North Carolina instead of Los Angeles.

But there's a reason Mark Zuckerberg moved to Silicon Valley, Hemingway moved to Paris, Bob Dylan moved to Greenwich Village, and Walt Disney moved to Hollywood.

We regress to the average of those around us. Surround yourself with the right people.

💰 2 Business Ideas

1. Jiu-Jitsu Products

I started rolling Jiu Jitsu at a gym in NYC recently.

People love talking about how Pickle-ball is the sport of the future, but let me tell you, this gym is packed and it seems every class there are more people walking in asking to sign up.

Even the search is sky rocketing for the sport thanks I'm sure to big media influencers like Jocko & Joe Rogan

The sport is fun as hell.

But the downside – it's not pickle-ball. And injuries are more common than your low-contact hobbies.

Specifically your fingers – tons of people in these classes tape their fingers.

I found these products the other day that run 0 ads, have a website from 2012, and mainly target rock climbing (with some BJJ)... introducing finger ice packs:

There are also nearly 6,000 monthly searches for an answer to this problem:

I think this is a dead simple product that a good marketer can takeover and have some fun with.

From here you can cross-sell a handful of products (knee pads, gi's, headgear, etc.) in a growing industry

2. White labeled personality tests –

I got coffee with a buddy the other week who told me:

"We don't hire anyone without an aptitude test."

While I don't know if these actually work, but I believe people think they work.

And companies like Predictive Index are crushing it going after this market selling personality tests to employers (for context, they have 465 employees and raised $101M).

I think there's probably an opportunity to find one of these aptitude/personality tests and white label the front of it. That way you're not hiring a behavioral scientist or scamming people, you're simply marketing a proven service.

Then I'd target a niche –

• Executive & Executive Admin compatibility

• The #1 personality test for sales teams (a role that hires often with a lot of turnover)

• Cofounder personality tests

Btw if you're curious like I was, my buddy uses an aptitude test called Criteria Corp

😎 3 Cool Internet Things:

1. 3 weeks ago the co-founder of Redbull, Dietrich Mateschitz, died. This man was a legend. Built a billion dollar energy drink company on top of extreme sports & clever marketing. Here's a great NYT piece on his life.

2. UserInput – A new service I found that pairs you with real people in your target market to collect feedback about your site/product. A lot of brand owners I know use heatmaps to monitor user behavior on their site, but UserInput collects feedback straight from your ideal customers. Plus, it's backed by one of the first Ecommerce CRO firms, so it's designed for converting visitors into buyers.

3. This is the funniest tweet I've seen in a minute

✌️

-Connor

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