Growth Ritual #79
📋 In This Issue:
The $2.5B Government-Mandated Gold Rush Nobody's Talking About
The One Thing Every Product Leader Should Be Terrified Of — 🔒
The AI Opportunity Hiding Between Your Database and Your BI Tool — 🔒
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The $2.5B Government-Mandated Gold Rush Nobody's Talking About
Every once in a while, a market shift happens that’s so massive, it’s almost boring.
There's no flashy keynote, no celebrity CEO, just a quiet change in the rules that creates an entirely new category of winners and losers.
Right now, one of those shifts is happening in Europe. It’s called the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), and it’s a ticking time bomb for businesses.
By 2028, it will force nearly every European company to track and report on their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics.
The problem? A recent survey found that 71% of businesses are "completely unprepared" for it.
This isn't just a headache for them. It's a government-mandated, multi-billion dollar opportunity for you. And I'm going to show you how to get your piece of the pie by ignoring the obvious play.
The Ticking Time Bomb (And Your Opportunity)
Think of CSRD as GDPR, but for sustainability. It’s a complex, non-negotiable requirement. Companies can't just ignore it.
Naturally, venture-backed giants are emerging to solve this for the enterprise. Look at a startup like Atlas Metrics.
They’ve built an all-in-one platform for carbon accounting, goal tracking, and automated ESG reporting. They promise to cut the time spent on this by 90%, and they're going to make a killing selling six-figure contracts to massive corporations.
The market for this is exploding. It’s set to surpass $2.5 billion by 2031, with 74% of large companies planning to invest in new ESG tools within the next year.
This is where most people stop. They see the big players and the big market and think, "I can't compete with that".
Good. Let them think that.
Don't Build the Next Atlas. Do This Instead.
The play here isn't to build another all-in-one, venture-backed behemoth. That's a red ocean of long sales cycles and fierce competition.
The real money —the indie hacker, bootstrapped, high-margin money— is in the niches. This is a classic "picks and shovels" play. You don't fight for the biggest gold vein; you sell the tools to the thousands of desperate miners who are completely lost.
The big platforms are building the equivalent of Salesforce. You need to build the Superhuman for one specific, painful part of the ESG process for one specific, overlooked industry.
Here are a few ideas to get you started:
The One-Click CSRD Microsite for Startups: Atlas offers reporting on a customizable microsite. Brilliant. But what about a hyper-simplified, template-driven tool that costs $49/month? It connects to a simple Google Sheet or Airtable base where a small business owner dumps their data (electricity bills, travel expenses) and it spits out a beautiful, compliant, password-protected webpage they can show regulators or investors. No complex dashboards. Just a single, solved problem.
Automated Supplier Data Collector for E-commerce: Companies like Emitwise focus on the supply chain, which can be up to 70% of a business's emissions. But what about the little guys? Build a Shopify app that helps D2C brands automatically email their suppliers with a simple form to collect the necessary ESG data. You’re not doing the whole carbon accounting piece; you’re just solving the painful data collection bottleneck.
The ESG Calculator for Digital Agencies: Agencies have a surprisingly complex carbon footprint—employee commutes, server usage for client websites, SaaS subscriptions, and flights. Build a simple web app that caters specifically to them. Integrate with Xero/QuickBooks to pull travel expenses, provide estimates for server emissions, and generate a simple, board-ready PDF report.
Why This Is the Perfect Indie Hacker Play
While everyone else is chasing the AI hype train, you could be building a ridiculously profitable business on the back of something far more powerful: government-mandated demand.
It's a "Must-Have", Not a "Nice-to-Have". Your customers aren't buying this because it's cool. They're buying it to avoid fines and stay in business. Churn will be incredibly low.
The Problem is Data, Not Magic. This isn't about building a complex AI model. It's about data collection, aggregation, and presentation. You can build an MVP for these ideas with no-code tools or a small dev team in a matter of weeks.
You Can Charge a Premium. This is a B2B compliance tool. You're not selling a $5/month novelty. You're selling peace of mind and saving companies dozens of hours of expensive consultant time. This is a $100-$500/month product, easily.
The Big Guys Will Ignore You. A $1M ARR micro-SaaS is a rounding error for the VC-backed giants. You can own a niche and print money for years before it's even on their radar.
The smartest founders aren't always the ones with the most revolutionary ideas. They're the ones who see a wave coming and position themselves to ride it.
This is that wave. It's unsexy, it's driven by bureaucracy, and it’s going to make a lot of quiet millionaires.
Your move: Stop looking for the sexiest idea. Find a painful, mandatory process in a specific industry and build the simplest possible tool to automate it. Your bank account will thank you.
Reply to this email: What's one "boring" industry you think is secretly hiding a gold mine for a micro-startup?
P.S. Know a founder chasing the wrong thing? Share this with them. You might just save them a few years of pain.
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