Weekly update #4 - Weekly progress update

Hi family and friend(s) (just one friend following at this point haha),

Getting back on track this week - first month of the year gone already!

I've been sick for the whole week but on the up the last couple of days. I didn't do any serious exercise this week to try to recover, will try get back on track with that this coming week.

I feel I've made good progress this week, I've learned a lot about how to research into niches.

I've been joining facebook groups, searching for subreddits, looking for comments and questions on product reviews and youtube videos.

Here's a look into my warm niches (i'm now calling them "hot niches" as warm feels more appropriate for friends and family niches) that I've been looking into:

I've been keeping track of niches I think of in a big google doc, where I've listed hot and warm niches, cold ones, and starting building out sheets for each one as I look into them. I have a lot of ideas and need to make sure I keep track of them! I've been writing down ideas as they come to me in Google Keep, trying to make them actionable as I do, and later transferring them into my Google Sheet.

Small thing this week: I made myself a half decent profile picture, as you can see in my "from" above - still not planning on using my name as I don't want to be google-able yet, just want to avoid employment / entrepreneurial crossover. But it feels good to put my face out there, make a bit more of a brand.

I deviated a bit from the 3 niches I was thinking of looking into, and this week looked into hiking and mountain biking in Australia.

I came across what feels like a breakthrough here thanks to chatting through the mountain biking niche with my Dad on the phone - thanks Dad! He is big into mountain biking, and especially in the context of keeping fit in retirement. I love this niche and it is a massive one with baby boomers mostly all retired / semi-retired at this point, and they want to keep up with their grandkids and stay active much more than previous retired generations. In chatting through the niche, Dad mentioned he had been writing email newsletters for a bike shop's email list, trying to grow their marketing presence. Writing content takes a ton of work, and a lot of the content he was doing was generic about mountain biking, not necessarily the shop. This is the kind of stuff bike enthusiasts want anyway, not the latest deals in store. Boom: there is a pain point - bike shops don't have the time to hire or even think about content for emails, and even if they do, custom content isn't worth paying for, it is too time consuming. I am aware AI is making this a lot easier these days, but that could be great for this business idea as I don't think store owners will know what to do with it anyway, and even writing AI emails takes time. So I'm planning to explore this more this week, Dad's idea of taking a generic series of emails and selling essentially marketing automation to mountain bike shops. If this works, it could be applied to any vertical, marketing automation for [insert type of small business] to drive customer retention and future sales.

I've also decided to keep going with intermittent fasting this year, trying to do it every second month. My good mate who is hopefully reading this told me about it last year; I really enjoyed the feeling of control it gave me by being disciplined to only eat between 1pm and 8pm each day. So I've started already a couple of days ago and I'll add it to my habit tracker every second month, so trying to do it for the whole month of February, while not being too hard on myself either. I'll add this into the habit tracker for next week's update.

This week's goals

Goal		Comments
Continuing my research on minimalism and residential architects.	✅	I didn't research either of these much this week, as I said above, I pivoted into outdoor niches, but I made some really good progress and research two niches solidly, so I'll give myself a pass here 😏

Life habits

	S	M	T	W	T	F	S
2🥛💧 in 🌅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
💪 20⏱	🚶‍♂️	🆇	🆇	🆇	🆇	🆇	🆇
0🍻	✅	✅	✅	✅	🆇	🆇	🆇
🛌 by 🕚	🆇	✅	✅	✅	🆇	✅	✅

Next week's goals

Goal
Deep dive into the bike shop owner niche, and marketing problems they may have. See if I can validate this marketing automation idea.

Thanks again for following along and helping keep me accountable! 🙏