5 Businesses You Should Start

Hey, thanks for joining for another week of New Venture Weekly.

So I have a very large list of businesses that I want to start, but probably never will - hence why I started this newsletter.

So today, I thought I’d give you 5 business ideas that have been on my mind a lot recently that I think you should start.

If you wanted to skip the initial build/validation phase, I’ve also managed to find businesses similar to these for sale on Mircons.

Here they are:

• Airtable to Directory

• Automated YouTube Channel

• Congressional Stock Trading Alerts

• Email Databases

• AI Voiceovers

Let’s jump in!

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#1 Airtable to Website SaaS

Directories are becoming a very popular online business model.

I wrote a breakdown of how to launch and monetise your own a few months ago, and since then, the trend has continued to grow exponentially.

During a gold rush, it’s a good time to be in the pick and shovel business.

Sp, create a SaaS that helps people effortlessly launch and monetise directories and databases.

Tools like this already exist, such as Unicorn Platform - the founder of this made $800k selling it (it’s probably worth a lot more now).

The market for this is huge, so there’s plenty of room to launch your own.

Basefront is selling on Microns for around $14k.

It lets users effortlessly create directories and databases using Airtable.

It’s already validated and has a good-sized library of templates. Definitely worth looking at if you want to skip the initial building phase.

I can see this easily becoming a $10k/m SaaS if positioned correctly.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how you can successfully buy and scale businesses. The tl:dr of that is, find one way to differentiate and one channel you can scale marketing.

Here are some ways to differentiate:

• Speed - how quickly you can launch. Offer a 2-minute start to launch time

• Payment providers - don’t just offer Stripe, have Lemonsqueezy and Paddle as well or instead of.

• AI-assisted population – enter a niche, get starter data auto-filled from scraping or GPT.

• Template Marketplace - let others buy/sell templates similar to Framer or Webflow

• Inbuilt email marketing tools – “Substack for Directories” - allow users to collect emails from directory visitors and send newsletters/updates.

• Free - Free to start and run, but take a percentage of subscriptions/ad revenue

• Ad Marketplace - Similar to Beehiiv’s ad marketplace, let users seamlessly monetise through ads

Channels to Exploit:

YouTube is where I see the most content about directories.

Make videos showing how easy it is, showcase directories doing well, and show people how to build their own.

Make content like this from Greg Isenberg and the owner of Unicorn Platform.

Or tutorial-style videos like this from Connor Finlayson.

Frey Chu has a whole channel dedicated to building directories you can use.

Other Channels:

• Newsletter - weekly newsletter showcasing profitable directories and showing people how to build/grow one

• Twitter & Reddit - this is where they’ve been growing so far

• TikTok/IG - make short versions of your YouTube videos and upload them here.

• Google Ads - be the first option for every high-intent search

#2 Automated YouTube Channel

It has never been easier to start your own automated YouTube channel.

I’ve been wanting to write a full newsletter breakdown on this for a while, but for now, here’s a full step-by-step breakdown on how to make/grow your own YouTube automation channel from Howtoai.

You can buy a channel that’s already monetised in the “Space” niche on Microns for about $1.4k.

Why buy one? You're monetised instantly. Instead of having to wait weeks/months to hit the threshold for monetisation, you can start right away.

Use this tool to find the best niches, verify channel earnings and analyse competitors.

Use tools like InVideo, Revid or Autoshorts.io to create AI-generated videos and Elevenlabs to make the voiceovers.

Here’s a good video breaking down how to do this.

#3 Stock Trading Alerts

One of my favourite Instagram accounts is Quiver Quantitative, they make videos on congressional stock trading that they track using their own tool.

These videos are primed to go viral for a couple of reasons:

• Rage-bait: people getting angry that congress members can trade stocks in industries that they control regulations and contracts for.

• Money-making: people are keen to get in on the action and profit from this insider knowledge.

These are super simple videos that generate a huge amount of attention for Quiverquant.com - every video gets hundreds of thousands of views.

I’ve found a slightly similar tool for sale on Microns for just $1.5k.

It needs a bit of work done in terms of branding, but the backend is all setup and ready to go.

It’s essentially connected to an API (like this) that sends out notifications when new stock disclosures are released.

If you’re not very techy, having all this set up and ready to go for $1.5k is probably worth it - but if you know how to code, you can do it yourself for a lot cheaper.

How I’d grow it:

• Private newsletter/community notifying you of every trade

• Dashboard that tracks trades (similar to QuiverQuant)

• Create videos just like QuiverQuant promoting your tool/community

As you grow, I’d look to keep building out features, but to begin with, a simple tool like this is great.

#4 Email Databases

Cold email is a massive business.

People spend a lot of money trying to get in front of decision-makers to sell their products/services.

Having a database of emails for your desired target audience is obviously very important for cold email.

Companies like Apollo or BuiltWith make millions selling data just like this.

Use tools like the above + Outscraper, Hunter.io, Clay, and Crunchbase to build databases of emails in specific niches.

For example:

• Music Promotion for artists to contact labels to get signed. Like this.

• UGC content creator database for brands to find creators. Like this.

• Angel investors who are actively funding startups. Like this.

Here’s a business for sale with a list of 100K startup founder emails.

If you expanded the offering to have multiple different related niches, I could see this scaling quite a lot.

I would grow this by making YouTube and TikTok videos around cold email, how to find leads and how to make money selling services/products.

They’ve also grown their business by DMing people on Twitter, Reddit and Facebook in relevant communities.

I would also look at making a newsletter to nurture these leads through weekly educational content.

Or you can run paid social ads - I really like the ads from Perspective, they’re a funnel-building software to generate leads, so in a similar niche. But I think they’d do really well here.

Here is their ads library and their founder’s ads library.

#5 AI Voiceover SaaS

By now, you probably all know Elevenlabs - they are by far one of the best tools to create high-quality AI voiceovers.

They allow you to create your own voice clones and then monetise them by letting other users use them for their projects.

They also have an API that you can use to integrate Elevenlabs with your own tools.

This means you can create custom AI voices using your own voice or voice actors you hire, and then resell them on your own platform using the API.

Here’s a tool similar to this for sale on Microns for about $1.2k. It’s built using different APIs that I don’t think are as good, so you’d need to change them, but otherwise, it’s in a good place to get started.

I would position the tool to a very particular niche, such as:

• Audiobooks

• Ads

• Customer service phone calls

• Outbound calls

• Podcasts

• Dubbing/translating

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