📖 Free Trial Finder (Idea Edition #9)

🧠 Top of Mind Technology

• Don’t let a phone without Apple’s signature blue chat bubbles dissuade you from admiring it. The Light Phone, which is designed to “give you the tools to flourish as the most thoughtful & intentional version of yourself,” is a simplistic iPhone alternative which can be preordered now for $400.

• Bryson DeChambeau, winner of this past weekend’s Men’s Golf U.S. Open, is kind of a nerd when it comes to the sport. Not only does he adjust make crazy adjustments to his shaft lengths and club grips, but he also custom 3D printed his irons.

• Self-Driving cars are still having issues. Waymo recalled more than 650 of its cars after one recently collided with a telephone pole. On top of that, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is currently investigating Waymo’s autonomous vehicle software after multiple reports of robotaxis crashing or potentially violating traffic safety laws. 

🍪 Business Bites

• In the market for a home but unsure of when the market will soften up? Learn how to better identify a changing market by learning how mortgage rates are set.

• Who said Pixar was dead? ‘Inside Out 2’ brought in $155 million in the opening weekend in the U.S, and is anticipated to bring in $295 million globally.

• Read how a recession indicator with a perfect record could still be right.

Idea Journal Feature:

A Free Trial Finder and Reviewer

⚾The Elevator Pitch - Build an affiliate marketing business by reviewing and testing out free trials of online products.

💡The Idea

If you can’t innovate, copy. When we were starting this newsletter, some of the criticisms we received included that it wasn’t “innovative enough” or “newsletters like yours already exist.” While both criticisms are valid, they are also the very same reasons why newsletters are great businesses. For instance, this newsletter costs $40/month to run (That is our Beehiiv subscription cost). As we approach 100 subscribers and beyond, we should be able to reach our breakeven point fairly quickly through ad revenue. Any additional revenue beyond $40/month can then go towards ad-spending and growth. We say all of that to get into our idea today because it has been done many times over. In fact, many people think this business model is a scam.

Our idea is to create an affiliate marketing website that reviews free trials for online products, tools, and courses.

Affiliate marketing, when done properly, is a very profitable and easy to manage business. The business model is simple:

• Create content in a particular area/niche.

• As you grow in popularity, work with brands to get a link that can be used to direct content viewers/customers to the brand’s website.

• When customer’s make a purchase on the brand you advertised for, you get a part of the sale (it’s like a commission).

We think there is an opportunity to source free trials from across the internet, generate online content (i.e. blogs, YouTube videos) by reviewing the free trials, and then eventually partner with the companies whose products you have reviewed to get an affiliate link and generate revenue.

Why Free Trials? 2 Reasons:

1. They bring value to the customer - Everyone loves free stuff, especially for one-time use. In a subscription-heavy market, many customers seek products they can use once and forget. Understanding the details of a free trial before signing up helps determine if it's worth the effort.

2. They also bring value to the business – Businesses would not offer free trials if they did not work. They know that many free trial users will only use the product for a short time before unsubscribing to avoid payment. They also know that:

   1. If the product is good, many users will come back and will have to pay to use the service a second time.

   2. Some users may like the product so much that they may choose to keep the service, or at least recommend it to others.

👷The Work

To our point earlier about “If you can’t innovate, copy,” we found a website that appears to have attempted this idea, although they last posted a review in 2023. This brings us to our next point which is: Affiliate Marketing can be a grind. You need to publish content and generate a substantial following before you see any significant revenue. Furthermore, for this idea in particular, you won’t even have affiliate deals with most of the brands you do free trial reviews for. If you choose to embark on this path, however, we recommend the following steps:

1. Build a website with an infrastructure/layout similar to FreeTrialFinder

2. Use affiliate marketing websites such as Clickbank to find affiliate links for products with free trials that you can review.

3. Do industry research to review free trials across different courses, products, and other online tools. Look for top products that will be the most-searched-for terms, so you can generate more traffic to your site.

4. Perhaps most importantly, leverage the tools available to you to make your life easier. Use ChatGPT to help write your blogs, and also use other AI tools like VEED.IO to convert your blog posts to YouTube videos.

💸Revenue

• Affiliate Commissions – For each product you review on the website that has an affiliate link, you could earn a commission every time somebody buys the product through your link.

• Ad Revenue – This would be a much smaller portion of the revenue, but you could choose to advertise on your website and YouTube.

🔻Expenses

• Website costs – This includes your domain name, hosting fees, and potentially website design.

• Affiliate management tools – You’ll want to keep track of how well each of your affiliate programs is doing (ex: revenue, clicks, conversion rate).

• Advertising and SEO costs – In order to get more eyeballs on your website, you will need to advertise. This will probably end up being your biggest expense.

👍The Good Stuff

• Low-Risk – To get started only requires ~$200-$500 of investment.

• Low Barrier to Entry – All it takes is a website and a few tools. With all of the website building platforms out there, anyone can take a shot at this idea (which is also why affiliate marketing got popular).

👎The Risks

• Crowded Space – Your website will be dedicated to free trials from all industries, but many of the free trials you will be showcasing will already be reviewed on other more niche and industry focused websites that offer better expertise.

• Time commitment – Most successful affiliate marketers will say you will need to wait up to a year before you generate any significant income. Are you willing to wait that long while continuing to spend advertising money?

• The future of SEO/The internet – We spoke about this in our newsletter last week. Internet users could potentially stop using Google and head straight to ChatGPT, which will render your affiliate website useless.

🤔 Musing of the Week

Apple should allow developers to create iPhone extensions that could operate on the iPhone similarly to how browser extensions work in a browser.

We have written about browser extensions here before. They are awesome tools because they just work in the background. You can read about some of the top browser extensions here. Unfortunately, due to Apple’s policies, extension-like technologies are not allowed on an iPhone. But if that technology did exist, here are a few ideas we had:

1. A timer widget that would appear in the corner of your screen while you are on social media to help you limit your time spent on the app.

2. A weather extension that changes the background color/tone of your phone to reflect the current weather in your location.

3. A music extension that tracks your listening patterns a bit more in-depth so you can have extra data during the year-end Spotify wrapped bonanza.

📚For the Road

• Top 10 tech trends for next 10 years (according to McKinsey)

• How much wood would a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood?