Basic Problem

👋 Hey all

So good to have you back to my newsletter about product ideas, building side projects, indie hacking, and problems worth solving.

Same time next week I'll be in France. Apart from the sun, smells, sounds, and sea salt on my skin, I'm mostly looking forward to the local cuisine.

Santé!

🍷 Wine

Wine is a fascinating beverage. No vintage is the same. While the basic properties of a grape type are the same, terroir and winemaker make all the difference. The right wine elevates your meal to new levels, the wrong one ruins it. There are uncounted numbers of vineyards and vintners. All of this makes wine a huge and highly fragmented market. And fragmentation means niche opportunities.

Let me tell you about a personal problem related to wine. After listening to this episode of "How I Built This", I wanted to buy some bottles from the McBride Sisters Collection. I failed. They don't ship to Germany and I can't find a store that carries their items. So here's the first evidence of unmet demand. Some kind of wine dropshipping comes to mind when thinking about solutions. Or build a trusted community of wine enthusiasts and establish informal shipping lines. Something along the lines of "you send me something from California and I'll send you something from the Rhineland in return."

Another regular problem I personally have is to either find a matching wine for a meal I have planned or find information about a bottle of wine on the shelf. Sure, wine apps are a dime a dozen. But not one seems to have really nailed it. I've yet to find a good one and the app store ratings support this notion. Talking about ratings: I find classic 5-star ratings for wine problematic. Okay, someone gave it a 4 of 5. But that's not helping. What I need are tasting notes and (social) proof that the person who degustated the wine knows what she's talking about.

There are many more opportunities around wine:

• Wine as a lifestyle. Take natural wines for example. There are documentations about that topic and fanzines. Find more in the The Brutal Wine Edition of "Why is this interesting?".
• Lifestyle, part 2: how to serve non-traditional winemakers, like musicians?
• Discoverability is a major issue in this fragmented space
• (Paid) communities can be a thing, even ones covering only certain aspects like a region or a grape (Syrah lovers unite 😃)
• Education, part 1: teach others about grape varieties, terroir, regions, history, and the people making wine
• Education, part 2: offer courses about winemaking or how to taste
• Wine as an investment. Just get a glimpse of the area in this great analysis about Investing in Champagne.
• Turn to Reddit and immerse in the communities there. r/naturalwine may be too small with less than 4k members, but r/winemaking has 62k, r/wine is at 155k, and r/Homebrewing (which includes vintners) shows a massive 1,1m members

And by the way: there is non-alcoholic wine. Even more opportunities ahead.

💬 Social Listening

Listen on social networks to find out what people are looking for.

Top "request for product" tweets on Twitter:

• Yelp for consumer apps
• A DeFi ranking board that shows every asset

Selected "someone invent" tweets on Twitter:

• A lotion, sunblock, sanitizer, and mosquito repellant all-in-one
• Something that actually helps the ARTIST
• A way to ‘like’ an email in Outlook rather than sending a “Thank you!” or “No problem!”
• An app where you put baby photos and it texts it out to all your aunts individually
• An astrological version of Alexa so i can be like "good morning [name] what are my transits for the day?"

📚 Worth Reading

There are weeks where I have problems finding two or three articles worth sharing with you. And then there are weeks like this. Enjoy!

The ultimate guide to the creator economy and The Creator Economy Market Map - Two views on the same space. In combination: 🔥

Five User Onboarding Challenges That Can Impede Your Product Growth - Quick tips on how to handle onboarding, depending on your product needing behavioral change, is hard to set up or is hard to use.

Don’t Feed the Thought Leaders - There are two kinds of advice. Bad, general advice not related to your problem. And good, contingent advice - the "it depends" type. Keep this in mind when scrolling through your Twitter feed.

Young Creators Are Burning Out and Breaking Down ($) - There are two sides to every story - this one shows what can happen to creators. By all means, don't stop building products for the creator economy. But when doing so, remember that everything we do has consequences.

Farewell, Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy ($) - The other day, I came around a tweet like "Some VC funded startups take $5 to make $1. Bootstrappers use $1 to make $5." That's what I thought about when reading this article about those unsustainable "business models." And there's a lesson for indie hackers in there, too: be careful what you subsidize or give away for free.

Surely We Can Do Better Than Elon Musk - Approach this one with an open mind. I consider this an important read to look behind the brand "Elon Musk" to see the man and his leadership skills.

Elon Musk’s ‘Teslas in tunnels’ are a $52 million bet on the future of transit - Focuses mainly on the Las Vegas tunnel project. But this article also includes a view on other companies and projects started by Musk. Much like the article above, but more nuanced.

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