Learn languages on the fly
Also: "Day One Fans", Fertility as a service, and building in public
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Catches of the week 🐟
Usefluent - learn new languages while browsing 🕶
It is simply amazing to see how the internet democratizes almost every aspect of learning. I have seen this play out in different domains and have come across a great product for learning new languages recently.
Usefluent is a Chrome Plugin that helps you to learn new languages while you are browsing the web. How does it work? It simply translates some of the words on a website you are accessing and guides you through learning these words in a very intuitive and playful way.
Below is a screenshot of an article I read on Techcrunch. You can see that some of the words were automatically translated into French and highlighted. I can see the translation by hovering over them and will be asked to translate the word into English, the next time I come across it.
Usefluent also has great user onboarding which makes it so easy to get started. Try it out yourself! 😍
The case of Usefluent also shows how business models and products have evolved over time. Not too long ago learning software consisted of buying a standard Rosetta Stone language package with a simple one-time upfront payment. Over time, this was replaced by subscription-based offerings, often containing a social or community aspect to build a stronger lock-in for customers.
Duolingo revolutionized the space with a free and completely gamified product that allowed users to learn in a fun and very intuitive environment. Usefluent is the next iteration of products as it simply sits on top of your browser and thus has the ability to offer a very subtle learning experience.
By the way - The world of Chrome Plugins is so fascinating and on my list of topics to revisit in the upcoming weeks!
Fertility as a service
Smaller, cheaper, and more powerful sensors are a huge enabler of new business models. I talked about the massive opportunities around building beautiful consumer products that allow customers to track, measure, and optimize their selves before and mentioned Levelshealth as an example.
I think that there is actually a pretty simple recipe that founders in this space have to follow:
Take a set of data points that people are interested in and truly understand the underlying desire/need of why people would be interested in measuring this data
Find a way to measure this data (through the right sensors) and build a set of meaningful analyses that you can derive from this data
Build a beautiful product around the data and your analyses and sell it directly to your consumers
Now don’t take me wrong - every single step needs to be done the right way and it is super hard to successfully launch such a product! However, as a framework, one can break it down to these “simple” steps.
I have recently noticed a few companies that have launched products in the fertility space (mostly focusing on women) and think that this is a perfect example to review my framework.
Modernfertility and Inne, for example, offer their customers a way to measure their hormone levels and thus generate insights and predictions about how long they are able to get pregnant. I love the Modernfertility website and think that they have tapped into a real honey pot here as I believe that the demand for predictability of fertility will continue to increase with the constant changes in society and the disruption of the “typical” 20th-century family model.
So let’s quickly review the steps:
Women’s hormone levels are a strong indicator of fertility. Everyone that wants to have kids someday would love to know this data in order to plan their future accordingly. Reproduction is so strongly wired into our brains that this makes for a very strong data set to sell to customers!
Without going into too much detail - one key analysis is the status quo of different hormone levels and to predict their decay into the future, including critical thresholds
An easy-to-use and beautiful designed product that triggers trust and confidence about the science behind it
I hope that this is useful and let me know if you know other interesting cases of startups building along with this framework! Would love to learn more 😊
Meme of the week
This picture is a funny twist of an all-time classic and I thought now is the right time to share it as more and more people that are new to crypto have turned their attention towards “the second-largest” blockchain project Ethereum (measured by market cap). This is also reflected in the recent price surge of $ETH.
I also took some time reflecting on what has happened in the Ethereum ecosystem since the launch less than 7 years ago. Here my original tweet promoting the Ether pre-sale in 2014:
Trade of the week 😎
I traded my breakfast for more food between lunch and dinner this week as I started intermittent fasting (so no food after 8 pm or before noon). I wanted to see if this gives me even more energy throughout the day and I have to say that I like it so far!
All joking aside - for the “real” traders among you, let me point you to this very interesting article which was sent to me by my friend Jonathan and points out some possible arbitrage opportunities with regards to SPACs. Good Read!
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The economy of Day One Fans 💃
It is funny because I have been thinking of a similar concept for a while but never found the right framework to formulate my thoughts until I came across this article by Benjamin Laufer the other day.
The “Day One Fans” talks about the opportunity to productize a very special connection between creators and their early fans by allowing fans to publicly display that they were an early backer.
Now, I don’t think that the “Day One Fan” is necessarily a new phenomenon (fans always felt “proud” to be early as it also meant that they were the original backers of a specific artist/creator). However, living in a digital world, we now have a) the data to easily track and proof early followership, b) digital channels for fans to share their “achievements” and thus build social capital and a reputation on top of it, and c) technology that allows us to easily create and track ownership of such digital tokens (-> blockchain).
This could be a very valuable asset for creators to build on top, by, for example, giving out “day one” fan badges and allowing those fans special perks like a backstage pass or personal meeting. Fans, on the other hand, could display their digital badges on social media or even treat their badge as a digital asset and trade it to other fans for a certain price.
Overall, I think that this is a missing piece in today’s creator economy and platforms like Spotify should build the tools and allow artists to capture this opportunity!
A perspective on Crypto in India
India was in the news recently as it was reported that the government will put forward regulations that would make owning cryptocurrencies illegal.
Opposing this harsh regulation, long-time crypto expert and proponent Balaji Srinivasan now published a blog post in which he lays out the advantages and opportunities that would arise from adding crypto to the “India tech stack”.
This is a great piece, that I highly recommend if you want to learn more about the status quo in India and how crypto might be a huge enabler for future growth.
Software for public builders
“Building in public” is a term that I have come across more and more often on Twitter, Linkedin, and in newsletters recently. It refers to founders of companies or products that embrace very open and transparent communication when it comes to their decision-making process. You can think of it almost like a digital diary of some kind.
As a result of this open communication, you can pretty much follow along as the founder is developing the product and it enables you to track and understand their thinking and how they come to conclusions.
I think that this is great for several reasons. First of all, it allows aspiring entrepreneurs to read and understand how their peers did it before them and ultimately enables them to go faster by skipping some of the mistakes others have made. It is, in a sense, a very collaborative approach!
Further, it enables the founder to grow an audience and build a brand for his or her company early on! Investors, employees, and other stakeholders can watch, interact and build a relationship with the entrepreneur on the way and share their feedback and thoughts early on. Ultimately this builds trust and accountability which the founder can build upon later on.
Now, I have come across this tweet last week and I truly believe that this is a space of opportunity! There is currently no good platform build for entrepreneurs that want to build in public. I will keep my eyes open and follow this space closely in the future!
That’s it for this week. I hope you enjoyed this newsletter and took some inspiration away from it! Feel free to reach out with feedback, ideas, and things you would like me to write more about. Make sure you hit subscribe below, to be among the first to receive this newsletter in the future