Happy New Year! We're kicking off 2026 with three businesses that prove useful beats clever: competitive intelligence that actually tells you what to do, infrastructure monitoring that prevents disasters, and free summits that build audiences worth millions.
In this Thursday episode, we break down:
- Competitive Intelligence Platforms: How one founder spent 8 years at $25K MRR selling data, then repositioned to "actionable recommendations" and hit 7 figures in 18 months. Why AI-powered strategic insights are replacing raw competitor tracking in 2026.
- Status Page Aggregators: The positioning masterclass - going from a $10/month "convenient dashboard" to a $79/month "early outage alert system" by detecting issues before companies even update their status pages. Perfect for any business depending on external services (Stripe, AWS, Shopify, etc.).
- Free Online Summit Events: How a goal-setting summit attracted 40,000 attendees over one weekend and became a revenue engine. The complete playbook for running free virtual events that build your email list and naturally sell your products.
Trend analysis: Why boring infrastructure and useful tools are having their moment in 2026. As enterprise budgets get scrutinized and infrastructure complexity grows (companies now use 37+ cloud services on average), there's massive opportunity in tools that prevent disasters or automate manual work.
The meta lesson: You don't need a revolutionary idea. You need to solve a specific problem well for a defined audience and charge what it's worth. Useful beats clever every time.
Subscribe at ideacaster.co for daily business ideas.
#businessideas #saas #entrepreneurship #competitiveintelligence #infrastructure