Last week was a mixture of expanding into new spaces while also going back to fundamentals. ArtsyPetz had an in-person pop-up event at a dog bar. I created a framework for coming up with business ideas.

Let’s get into it.

ArtsyPetz's first-ever pop-up event

This was really fun and something that I never imagined doing. I also envisioned ArtsyPetz being an online business because I love scalability. Then I found an opportunity for a pop-up event at a local dog bar (yes, you read that right. It’s a combination of bar and indoor dog park).

The first thing I had to figure out was…a table lol. I needed a table and then I needed to put stuff on the table. All simple things that I never considered because I never thought I would do something in person. I printed out some example portraits and put the social media handle on each of them. I also included a QR code that went to the website and a before/after infographic to show people the process. People were interacting with all of them. In hindsight, I could have used a bigger table.

As a small aside, it is damn near impossible to buy a table cloth in a store anymore. I learned that the hard way as I drove around in a frenzy looking for one an hour before the event.

A lot of cool stuff happened during the event.

The products really resonated with people and that was awesome to see. There were no purchases live but I didn’t expect there to be. If the sales happen, they’ll probably be between now and Christmas. I did track analytics and it was cool to see that people were actually going to the website right after talking to me.

My sales pitch changed over time. At the beginning, I just waited for people to come up to me. I went from passive to active and explaining my products strengths by highlighting pain points and how my product solves them.

I was next to an insanely talented sales executive who started his own company and had a table next to mine. He was so much more active in his sales approach. Before I would have called it aggressive but now I understand how it’s kind of necessary. It was impressive to watch him in action over the course of 4 hours and he definitely influenced how I was tuning my pitch in real time.

Another vendor’s social media manager was there and I had a chance to speak with her, which was great. She let me ask some questions about how she looks at social media and marketing. The most interesting part wasn't what she said but what she did. I watched her walk around, paying really close attention to everything in the venue and building. I realized she was scanning for content to post. That’s when the lightbulb went off for me that I need to do that too so I started doing it at the event.

There was talk of future opportunities for ArtsyPetz! Multiple people from other vendors came up to me telling me they loved ArtsyPetz and were actively giving me ideas to help me grow. That was so cool. Some even approached me to be a vendor at their own events that they host so I might end up doing more of these things.

The event itself was only 4 hours long and I learned so much. The goal is still to be an online company but all the in-person feedback and learning was a great use of my time and I’m happy I did it.

Business idea framework

So far in my solopreneur journey, my biggest point of frustration has been around coming up with ideas for businesses. It feels so vague and I haven’t seen anyone speak to any good systems around it.

All the talk around business ideas has always felt gimmicky.

My gut tells me that it is equal parts art and science. At its core, it feels like the skillset is finding opportunity in any given situation.

Once I settled on that, I decided to set up a framework I could use to help to develop that skill.

I saw Ali Abdaal and Alex Hormozi use a separate framework for assessing business ideas that I really liked. It involved answering these 4 questions:

• Does the idea solve a pain point for an audience?
• Does the audience have purchasing power? (Can they afford it?)
• Is the audience easy to target?
• Is the audience growing?

I saw these questions and immediately thought they made a lot of sense. It didn’t solve the problem of coming up with ideas but at least I had a way to assess the ideas. Plus, Abdaal and Hormozi are clearly good at what they do so that made me confident in the questions.

In Notion, I set up a database to record any and every business idea I come up with. With each idea, I answer the 4 questions from above but, more importantly, I come up with 2 ways to pivot the idea to make it better.

Let’s say an idea gets a “yes” from the first 3 questions but the a “no” from the last one because the audience isn’t growing. That gives me an opportunity to come up with ways to pivot the business to target a different, related audience that is growing.

That’s where AI came in to help. I had this framework set up but I wanted to practice it. I opened up a new Claude chat using Opus and asked it to give me business ideas that I could put through the framework and it was incredibly helpful. I spent an afternoon going through a bunch of examples and at the end I started to notice a difference.

That exercise has helped me to start developing a way to see opportunity in any situation. I think this is THE skill to know so I’ve spend a little bit of time working on this every day.

That was week 11. On to week 12.