💰PokeInvesting

At first, I thought this was a joke or some kind of in-game mechanic, but no, PokeInvesting is an actual thing. People invest in Pokémon cards with realworld money, the same as you would with other kinds of assets. It sounds ridiculous: who would put serious money into Pokémon cards of all things? According to r/PokeInvesting, many do:

And if you think about it, it makes sense. The millennial generation grew up with Pokémon and put some kind of emotional value into this brand. At the same time, they’re now old enough to have actual money in their bank accounts, not just spending their parent's money to buy Pokémon cards. And for some millennials, this type of investment may be more appealing than more traditional investment vehicles. Why invest in boring old stocks or real estate, when you can get similar or better returns in alternative assets like Pokémon cards, which you clearly value more than some big corporations run by suite-and-tie, 60-year-old men?

PokeInvesting is not just a standalone concept, but rather part of a broader trend of investing in alternative assets. This trend encompasses a wide range of categories, from comic books and domain names to watches, tickets, wine, and more (checkout alts.co for more alternative asset categories).

Opportunities

• Sell data: one of the most common questions I saw community members ask was how much they should sell/buy certain card decks for. You could collect this type of data to create a market index where people can go to check what certain decks are worth.

• Media brand: alts.co is a great example of a media company in the alternative assets space. Besides having its own fund, it’s primarily a media company with a newsletter, podcast, and community, reaching more than 90k subscribers. One could start a similar type of media brand focused on PokeInvesting, writing newsletters and guides on this asset class. Later, you could build other products on top of that brand, for example, a marketplace. Doug DeMuro made $40M doing something similar with Cars&Bids, where he built a marketplace for cars on top of his huge YouTube audience.

🔬 ScienceUncensored

The r/ScienceUncensored subreddit has formed as a kind of counter-culture for the larger r/Science subreddit, and science communication in general, which members of r/ScienceUncensored perceive to be too heavily moderated based on “political ideology, religion, or disagreement with posted content.” I found this interesting as I've noticed a big rise in the popularity of media that’s communicating scientific topics to the general public. Podcasts like The Huberman Lab or Peter Attia’s The Drive gained massive followings, which seems to be part of a self-optimization meta trend.

Opportunities

• Media: As science podcasts attract a large audience, one could take the ScienceUncensored “movement” and create content around this. Either in the form of a podcast, where you discuss controversial scientific articles that other hosts are too cautious not to touch. Or you can turn r/ScienceUncensored into a newsletter. Jaisal, the founder of InternetIsBeautiful has done that very successfully with r/InternetIsBeautiful, a huge subreddit where people share cool stuff they found online. He had a massive launch and gained thousands of subscribers in a short time.

• Ecommerce: A bit of a wild card, but it's something I’ve been thinking about for a while: one could create an ecom brand that sells science-y products to listeners of these podcasts. Huberman, Attia, but also folks like Tim Ferriss frequently talk about products that have some kind of exotic side effect which they love the product for. But those are always hard to get, especially for me living in the EU. I’d love for someone to sell these niche-y types of products that are mentioned on the large US podcasts and sell them to the EU. For example, LMNT and Magic Spoon are products I wanted to get some time ago when they were mentioned by Tim Ferriss. But at that time, it was impossible to access them in Germany. I even emailed both brands asking when they were available in Germany, but they couldn’t tell me. There are alternatives on the market, but most of them suck, have bad ratings, or are not of the same quality

🐦 Twitter Finds

1. Opportunity

“Approach to come up with best idea for building in public:

- 80% of Twitter audience have the problem

- The product can be useful with 1-2 features

- The product scales vertically, the more features you add, the more useful it is, so you can build & tweet features as marketing” Minh-Phuc Tran

I felt silly when reading this. I spend so much time on Twitter in the Build In Public and IndieHacker scene and didn’t come up with this myself. But it makes total sense: building in public makes is most effective when building stuff that your Twitter audience needs.

That got me thinking: why do I only look for problems in online communities on Reddit, never on Twitter? Mainly because Twitter is much messier to search than Reddit. Reddit is already categorized into communities, and they are quite easy to skim through. Twitter is a different beast, with a constant flood of nonsense where it’s extremely difficult filtering out and categorizing the type of data I look for. But if I could figure out how to filter signal from noise on Twitter, that could be pretty cool for spotting non-obvious opportunities. I use GummySearch for Reddit and would love to use a similar tool for Twitter. Yes, I know, Twitter API pricing to the moon, but I’d still use a tool if there was one out there.

2. Opportunity

“Business idea: Service for a lawyer to check a legal agreement generated by ChatGPT and ensure they're legally compliant. Many lawyers will refuse to review other lawyer's legal agreements and only write their own.” Jack Smith

In the thread, Jack also mentions that he had tried finding this type of lawyer on Fiverr, but didn’t find anything useful. This makes sense as most lawyers won’t take on this type of work as it threatens their job. But this could be a great opportunity for someone who’s willing to do the job or knows lawyers who are willing to.

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