Hey all,

Matthias here, creator of the Founder Finds newsletter. Every week, I spend hours researching business opportunities and trends and summarise my findings in this short-form newsletter. With that, let’s get started with this week’s finds.

💎 Exploding topic around Machine Learning

MLOps (Machine Learning Operations) combines practices like Machine Learning, DevOps, and Data Engineering. The idea here is to standardize and streamline the lifecycle of ML models. This includes designing, building, deploying, and maintaining models in a continuous and automated way.

It’s a hot topic right now given the incredible hype around AI. But developing AI/ML models introduces unique challenges compared to traditional software projects. In a way, ML development is a lot more science than engineering: it’s an iterative process in which ML practitioners experiment with various data sampling techniques, hyperparameters, model architectures, etc. It’s very similar to the trial-and-error approach of science. And MLOps refers to the practices & tools that help practitioners at each of those steps.

Opportunities:

• MLOps Tools Directory: build a directory with the best MLOps tools. You can either curate them and/or let users upload and rate the tools. The keyword “MLOps tools” has really low keyword difficulty and enough search volume (check ahrefs keyword tool for the keyword “mlops tools”). And search volume is likely to increase given the trend. If you manage to play this SEO game and get reliable traffic to your site, there are many ways to monetize: affiliate marketing, lead gen, ads, sell your own MLOps tool …

• Apache Airflow with better UI: Apache Airflow is one of the most used tools in MLOps. However, there are many ways in which one could improve it. I heard users complain about Airflow’s lack of visualization, old UI, difficulties with executing it locally, and not being great for iterative development. Apache Airflow is open source, so you can build on top of it. One active competitor in the space is Sematic.

💡Interesting things I found this week

Ian Nuttall explains his $20,000/mo SEO business with 0 employees.

Students of the richest parents are 2.2x more likely to be admitted to elite universities (not surprising, but still interesting to see the data!).

Shocking how bad life expectancy in the US is, given that it’s the country with the highest health expenditure per capita in the world.

Hilarious: Worst UI’s ever. Engineers compete to create the worst UIs possible.

Fun tool for generating words that don’t exist.

💎 Rapidly growing subreddit of art students

r/LearnArt is getting quite popular on Reddit. I’m wondering whether we can see the same trend in the art world as we see in chess: when AI first beat Kasparov in chess, everybody thought chess would be dead. But a few years later, quite the opposite is the case: chess is more popular than ever, with chess streamers like Hikaru Nakamura making millions, and the platform chess.com generating $100 million in annual revenue. Similar to when AI beat Kasparov, currently everybody thinks AI is going to kill art. But I think it’s quite possible that 5-10 years from now, art will be more popular than ever before.

Maybe we see the first signs of that in the growth of r/LearnArt: a community dedicated to helping users improve their art skills. The subreddit provides a platform for artists of all levels, beginners to professionals, to share their work, get constructive feedback, find useful resources, and engage in insightful discussions related to various art forms.

Opportunities:

• Content: I can imagine that just like how chess streamers have built a strong and dedicated following, we will see art streamers build massive followings. By showcasing the process of creating artwork, artists can connect with their viewers on a personal level and build a community around their craft. It may be still early days for this, but there already are a few relatively large art streamers out there, like nacho dayo or drawfeeshow.

• Coaching: Looking at chess again: given the popularity of the sport, many amateurs hire coaches to become better at chess. Similarly, I can imagine that the same will happen in the art world. A small business / freelance opportunity could be to just offer art coaching, helping people get better at all things art. A bigger opportunity would be a marketplace/platform where students can book coaches. chess.com offers this for chess coaches.

💎 Domain-driven business building

I see more and more people building businesses like this: they look for expiring .com domains with valuable backlinks, purchase them, and develop a website that’s relevant to the given domain. Two examples:

• Peter Askew has done this multiple times, for example with RanchWork.com and VidaliaOnions.com.

• Ian Nuttall describes how he bought VisualFractions.com for $2k, turned it into a 5-figures per month business, and sold it for half a million.

The big advantages of this approach are obvious: you have distribution built-in in the form of already existing backlinks and in the form of a great domain name that people may randomly type into their browsers (e.g. when you like Vidalia onions, you might just type in VidaliaOnions.com to find them). And as distribution seems to always be the biggest challenge for new businesses, having some form of distribution from the beginning is worth gold.

The approach here would be to head over to expireddomains.net and hunt for domains with great names and high-quality backlinks. Alternatively you can go to domain auction sites like auctions.godaddy.com and purchase them there (they’ll be more expensive, but most probably have better quality domains and backlinks). The given domain will then determine what you build! I’ll most probably give this approach a try at one point, super excited by it. Read more about it here.

That’s it for today! If you like what you read, I’d love for you to share the newsletter with anyone you think would enjoy it. They can subscribe here.

Best,

Matthias