Top of the Post 📥  …

• The Soaring Fintechs of 2024

• Australia’s Workforce Got Big Reason to Cheer

• Podcast: Luke Taylor’s Search Fund Journey in New Zealand

• Success story: Reduce-Reuse- Rheaply

• Complete SEO Guide on Winning 100,000 Visitors from Google

Weekly Catchups

News | Industry Insights | Trends

• 👩‍💻 2024’s Soaring Fintechs

  In the past two years, Fintech has been pretty doom. Venture funding to financial technology startups fell by 50% in 2023 from 2022. But VCs still see a handful of bright spots. Investors say generative AI and payroll providers could take off in 2024. However, Insurance technology companies could have a tough time measuring risk thanks to the climate crisis. 
  

•  📴the Grid

  Australia will soon introduce a law allowing employees to ignore unreasonable work calls and messages from their bosses after office hours. While employers can still reach out, the legislation protects workers from being punished for not responding. With this, Australia joins a host of countries like Italy, Portugal, and Kenya that have passed or are in the process of passing these rights to disconnect. France was the first to create a blueprint of this kind in 2017.

• 🤖💤 ChatGPT Ought to be Less Lazy

  In a post on X, Sam Altman said a new update would fix ChatGPT’s refusal to complete some tasks. Users have been complaining the bot has been slacking off and even issuing some sassy responses. Some users found inventive strategies to get around ChatGPT’s ‘winter slump.’ They found the AI model provided longer responses if they promised it a $200 tip. 

Nurturing the Leader Within

Personal Development | Success Story

Circling Back

Garry Cooper had no intention of being an entrepreneur. At Northwestern University’s medical school, he was dubbed ‘Cart Guy’ for distributing medical equipment from one lab to another. “I was just trying to share resources with people who needed them,” he said. Little did Cooper know his idea would blossom into a circular economy business that enables Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and universities to sell, rent, or donate physical assets they no longer needed. 

By 2016, Cooper (33) had co-founded Chicago-based Rheaply, a resource exchange platform that helps companies purchase goods while cutting carbon emissions. Rheaply’s addressable market was by no means small. An estimated $600 billion of surplus assets sit idle in American companies, equalling the economy of 44 U.S. states. 

🔎 What problem did Rheaply spot? At large companies, employees often buy things the company already has (machinery, tools, equipment). They also throw out things the company could still use. That's because there's no way for everyone in the company to know what they have, what they need, and how to get items across that divide. Garry and his team built Rheaply to address this challenge by helping companies reuse their products.

☔ It's raining clients: More than one million items have been posted on the platform’s website for selling or purchasing. Last year alone, Rheaply recaptured 2.4 million worth of value while getting hold of 491,000 pounds of stuff!

How did Garry do it? It wasn’t smooth sailing for Garry and his company when they started. What happens when you pitch to clients who don’t see any value in your solution? To initiate business, companies must acknowledge that resource wastage is a humongous business challenge. While on his way to capturing this market, Garry was determined to win the thinking of his clients. 

♻️ He knew the proof of the pudding lay in data. Garry compiled several case studies to publish empirical data that suggested that it is profitable for businesses to reuse, reduce, and recycle. 

💰For its first clients, Rheaply’s pricing was extraordinarily cheap. ‘So cheap like if you said no to it, you just don’t like us,’ Cooper said jokingly. He wanted to prove the monetary benefits for businesses practicing waste management to 99.99% of the market. 

💸The Biology department of the University of Chicago, one of Rheaply’s initial clients, saved a whooping $700,000 through Rheaply’s services. The University is now one of the leaders in sustainable practices.

Rheaply is focusing on educating clients about sustainable business practices. It’s also on a mission to find future leaders who are passionate about the cause. Garry’s advice to entrepreneurs who are failing to communicate their value? Think about solutions that benefit businesses through the years and not just today. Also, have a burning passion for what you’re creating despite the initial distrust. 

Strategies | Tools | Marketing Tips

SEO Guide: Your First 100,000 Visitors

Noteworthy businesses lose the opportunity of hitting 100,000 visitors monthly. Winning the page views game has a method. But before, think about the following factors 

1. How competitive is my niche? 

2. What is the quality of my content? 

3. Your website’s domain’s authority and backlink profile. 

SEO can feel overwhelming as you wrap your head around different metrics that drive 100,000 organic visitors. Zero down on the following three factors: Keyword and competitor research, content organization, and deploying your SEO content machine. 

Keyword Research 

• Dig into your competitor’s keywords and filter them down to the keywords you can rank for. 

• If your organic visibility is relatively weak, stay away from high-volume and high-demand keywords. 

• Focus on “medium-tail” and “long-tail” keywords. These are more specific and less competitive. 

Content Organisation 

• After you have your target keywords, create pillar pages linking out to content clusters for the topics you wish to target.

• Pillar pages are foundational articles establishing the authority of a website on specific topics. They’re comprehensive and link to certain content clusters.

• Example: For a website selling wellness products for women, a pillar page can be “Ultimate Guide to Women’s Wellness.” This page then acts as a central hub linking to related content clusters and products offered on the website like “Fitness for Her,” “Skincare Regime,” or “Nutrition for Women.” 

Developing SEO Content Machine 

• Most websites with 100,000 visits per month have a consistent content output that keeps the site relevant.

• Delegate to responsible individuals tracking your content’s output. You will need a team of at least one SEO editor and one writer to reach consistently high-quality output. 

• Equip your team with an editorial calendar for planning content. 

• Ranking on Google picks up with well-produced written content that holds value to the target audience. 

Tools Recommendation 

• Use tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to find the total volume of keywords directly.

• Track your output with Airtable.

• Create SEO briefs with swifbrief.com, Keywords Insights, or ChatGPT.

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