The Fast Growing World of ESG!
The Fast Growing World of ESG!
And Earning $100k/day teaching Excel
Welcome to the Trends Newsletter!
Each week we share business ideas and opportunities, and posts, articles and a lot more about the latest market trends. We also bring to you some interesting and quality business content from across the web.
This week you will find:
ESG-responsible future
Business Idea- Cohort Course Review Website
TID's 3-2-1 (3 Tweets, 2 Podcasts, 1 Article)
Book Recommendation of the Week
A Green Future for all ESG-driven Businesses
The investment world is raving about ESG. Modern-day investors want to work with companies that can vouch that they are ESG responsible. In May 2021, even India imposed compulsory ESG reporting requirements on the top 1000 public companies.
The facts and figures below are all the proof you need!
$30tn sustainable investing globally
34% increase in 2 years
71% CEOs feel responsible to ensure that the organization’s ESG policies reflect their customers’ values
55% CEOs believe that their organizations must look beyond financial growth to achieve long-term success
By 2025, $53 trillion will be invested in ESG driven companies.
What exactly is ESG?
Short for Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance, ESG is an ethics-centric approach to running your business. Think of the ESG report as an annual report card that tells you whether or not you have been conscientious towards your environment, society and the way the business is run.
Companies have to prepare elaborate reports showcasing all the efforts they put in to incorporate ESG into their day-to-day dealings. The broad categories include:
Environmental: Conservation of our environment, energy savings, managing greenhouse emissions, avoiding water pollution, etc.
Social: Data privacy, community, gender inclusion, mental health, etc.
Corporate Governance: guidelines and structure defining the organization, empowering policies, best employee practices, political contributions, etc.
The Indian Rules for ESG Reporting, 2021
Recently, there have been some major developments in the ESG rules in our country. These shifts will force the top 1000 public companies by market cap to publish their ESG reports. 9 Responsible Business Conduct (RBC) principles have been laid out as a framework. The companies’ disclosure requirement are based on these principles. Some of the required disclosures include:
Sustainability goals, targets and performance
Resource usage and intensity metrics
Greenhouse gas emissions
Gender and social diversity
Occupational health and safety
Anti-corruption and anti-bribery policies
Read the detailed guidelines here.
With all these changes underway, the auditing experts of our country predict that ESG reporting will become as essential as financial auditing in the future.
Future Opportunities in this field
Investing in ESG-driven firms is the new trend. Organizations will want to become ESG-friendly and attract funding and profits. Here are a few opportunities we think will be the latest wrinkles:
Boutique ESG Consulting or Auditing Firms. ESG will take the finance world by storm and we definitely are going to need brilliant auditors to help us out. The demand for them will be on a rise. Consultations regarding ESG practices and requirements will be in high demand. A boutique firm that can offer such services is bound to be supremely successful.
How about a SaaS Tool to help investors discover and analyze ESG scores? Anything technology-related is bound to be a hit!
ESG Content. Blogs or vlogs or social media- anything that explains ESG to the public. And raises awareness! The latest regulations, benchmarks, top ESG-driven companies, and a lot more can be used to create content on the daily. You can even aim to become an ESG influencer!
Any other ideas swimming in your mind? Drop a comment below.
Cohort Courses Reviewed?
If you’ve been with us for a while, you know how much we love a good cohort course. Apart from being wonderful add-ons to our resumes, these courses help us grow as individuals.
First things first, what are cohort courses?
Say you’ve enrolled for a certificate course in X. Most cert-courses are self-paced and let you finish whenever you want to. But, in cohort-based scenarios, you and a group (cohort!) of people will complete X together in a set time. This way, you get peer support whenever you need it and you are motivated throughout. It’s interactive, it’s immersive and it’s fun. Think of it as your childhood classroom!
Bonuses in most cohort courses include expert lectures and industry connections. In 2020s, this seems like the perfect learning environment, considering all of us are stuck at home and need some form of human contact.
But, here’s the catch in most cohort courses: There is no way to determine which course is genuine or is the victim to top-notch marketing. Most cohort-based courses are recommendations one finds on IG or YouTube or podcasts. Influencer recommendations are not too reliable- most of them benefit from the promotions in some or the other way.
So, how do you know which course is your perfect match? Adds value to your life? And offers exceptional learning value?
Business Idea: How about a cohort course review website?
Considering review websites are the most popular websites out there, creating one for cohort courses can be a profitable endeavor. In fact, the most googled phrase for any product or service is “review.” A website that provides authentic reviews of all the well-known cohort courses can really help ferret out the good ones in this fast-growing market.
As for monetizing the website? That should be a piece of cake! Once your webpage is up and running, you can sign up for advertisements or affiliate fees.
If you don’t want to limit yourselves to a website, how about an YT channel? Or an IG page? Just saying- endless opportunities!
TID's 3-2-1
3 Tweets
Really great thread on how people percieve luck and how they can build their own luck.
Shopify might be getting all the hype right now but WordPress is still the grand-daddy of Website building. There are still huge opportunities to build WordPress apps.
Some great advice in this thread. We personally love Ankur Warikoo’s response, “If I can’t trust you, it doesn’t matter how smart you are.”
2 Podcasts
The Psychology of Self-Doubt by The Hidden Brain Podcast
We’ve spoken on our own podcast before about how self-doubt and the imposter syndrome has plagued us in our personal and professional lives. This podcast is a great reminder to everyone who suffers from self-doubt that even the greatest minds in history had the same problems as you. The podcast digs into the causes and possible solutions to these feelings.
The Minimalist Entrepreneur ft. Sahil Lavingia, Founder, Gumroad
One of our longest episodes on the podcast discussing Sahil Lavingia’s new book ‘The Minimalist Entrepreneur’. The idea of the book is that not everyone, nor every business, is suited to venture capital and that there is a more capital efficient way to build businesses. Sahil envisions a future where creators can easily become entrepreneurs and lays out a playbook for them.
1 Article
How an Excel TikToker manifested her way to making six figures a day
We love this article so much that we spoke about this in our latest business munchies episode as well - fast forward to the 37/38 minute mark to hear our take on this.
Kat Norton’s success illustrates how there’s a huge opportunity to take complex topics, simplify them and then talk about them on unconventional platforms like TikTok. Most of us would’ve scoffed at the idea that Excel tutorials would be succesful on a short video platform.
What other complex ideas can you do this for? Here are a few ideas
Taxation for ordinary folk.
SEO & Performance Marketing.
Using No-Code or Low-Code tools for app development.
Book Recommendation - Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models
At first, the writing style of this book may be a bit confusing because they go through dozens of mental models before you realise what they’re doing. However, once you get a hang of it - there are invaluable learnings in this book.
Here are our notes from the book.
Mental models basically provide you a framework for how to look at the world or just a piece of the world. For example, the Sales Funnel is a mental model on how you can think about the stages that potential customers are in when they’re thinking of buying your products.
My favourite mental model in the book was the Eisenhower Decision Making framework illustrated below:
This decision making framework allows me to allocate priority to tasks and how I should be thinking of them from a long term perspective.
There are many such helpful mental models throughout the book. The writing style may be grating to a few people.
That’s it from us this week! Share this with your friends, family and colleagues who want to stay on top of Market Trends and Business Ideas & Opportunities!
Until next week!
Sahil & Sid