🕺 League of leaps

Plus: A TikTok flop, a relaxing breathing technique, and more.

Share The Hustle: https://thehustle.co/join?ref=7598767985 Check your referral progress & prizes here 👋  Good morning. Looking for a new pad? A 23k-square-foot Palm Beach compound just opened up. The $205m property sits on 4.2 acres and has eight bedrooms, two swimming pools, and ocean views. It's also the latest megamansion vying to break a $200m sale price in the area. Unfortunately, even at this price point you'll be hiring contractors: The listing agent says the place needs some renovations, but that "the bones are great."   STARTING UP This business can turn any song into sheet music  ❌  The problem: Musicians can't always find sheet music for the songs they want to play. 💡  The pitch: Songscription calls itself the "Shazam for sheet music" and uses AI to instantly create notation for songs. The startup's AI model analyzes uploaded audio and generates sheet music, guitar tabs, or digital music files which users can edit directly on the platform.  🚀  The outlook: After hitting 150k users and raising $5m in funding, Songscription has plans to expand its instrument library — for now, it supports piano, violin, flute, guitar, bass guitar, and trumpet — and add new features to allow for automatic music leveling and arranging. The startup is also working on "a music coach in your pocket" that will offer real-time feedback. Let's hope the bot is kind to shy beginners. NEWS FLASH   "Clair Obscur: Expedition 33" — Sandfall Interactive's RPG for people who enjoy crying while gaming — received 12 Game Awards nominations, the most any single video game has received in the awards' 11-year history. Um, OK: Apple released a $230 iPhone Pocket, a 3D-knitted crossbody bag made in collaboration with Japanese designer Issey Miyake that fits… pretty much just an iPhone. Wondering if you could already get a cheaper version or even a crochet pattern dupe on the ever-entrepreneurial Etsy? The answer is… yes. Jeff Bezos and Vik Bajaj, who co-founded Alphabet-owned biotech startup Verily, are co-CEOs of Project Prometheus, a startup that will build AI products for the engineering and manufacturing space. It's already raised $6.2B and has ~100 employees. Meadow AI, a Seattle startup that helps restaurants and retailers automate secret shopper audits and evaluate customer-employee interactions, is out of stealth with $6m. PIVOT AND PROFIT How AI + authenticity are driving marketing Thanks to the headwinds blasting fiercely on all of our faces (algos, AI, attention spans that rival those of goldfish), the old guard of marketing is on a slow march to death.  The good news: The loops work better, anyway. Read up on how career marketers continue to plan, pivot, and profit in an increasingly AI-powered world.  Over 1.8k people donated their data to this report — maybe don't ignore them? Get in the loop   THE BIG IDEA Dance makes it to the major leagues    Dance majors rejoice: You can finally call your dad and tell him that his dreams are "wildly impractical and upsetting grandma." A professional dance league is launching soon, and a new career path is coming with it. The founders of STEEZY, an online dance class platform, closed a $7m seed round to start the International Dance League (IDL), a professional association for dancing as a sport.    Here's how it'll work: The league will start with six teams, representing cities across four continents.  Teams will operate like NBA franchises with contracts, salaries, seasons, and rivalries. IDL events will be full-blown spectacles with professional judges, DJs, halftime shows, and smaller showcases for local dance troupes. Dance is a notoriously unreliable line of work — even the first dancers depicted in 9k-year-old cave paintings probably had reservations about pursuing a career in it over hunting or gathering.   The IDL is trying to challenge that by establishing a clearer career trajectory for dancers.    Sports leagues usually have some kind of talent development pipeline (Little League to college to minors to pros). Dance doesn't.    That makes the IDL an interesting case study: a sport being built in reverse, starting with a professional league and figuring out talent-sourcing as it goes.    What's in it for investors?   Though the IDL is still hashing out player development, dance has an established audience. The league's big draws are that base of interested spectators and its potential for virality.    STEEZY's network of instructors has 150m+ followers, and dance content often performs well on TikTok (if you didn't know).    Still, the IDL faces unique challenges. Other professional leagues have successfully capitalized on viral trends and activities, like the PPA Tour for pickleball and the ACL for cornhole.   But they didn't have to standardize rules for an artistic medium, promote teams across multiple continents, and build a talent development pipeline — tall asks, but if the IDL pulls them off, it could make dance careers more viable and inspire more dreamers to pursue them.   🔗 HIGHLY RECOMMENDED   You're getting sleepy… very sleepy. And it might be thanks to the founder who built a thriving media empire off of our insomnia. Here's how she cornered the market to solve the billion-dollar sleep deprivation problem. NEWSWORTHY NUMBER Number of days that Sky Sports' women-focused TikTok account, Halo, lasted before it was shut down following online backlash. The channel, which Sky had dubbed its "lil sis," was intended as a sports news hub for young female fans, but instead featured content on matcha, "hot girl walks," and Labubus set against sparkly pink branding, per The Verge, with many calling it out as sexist and patronizing. The broadcaster ditched the account over the weekend, acknowledging it "didn't get it right" in a final TikTok post. HOW YOU HUSTLE Every week, we like to check in on what you're building. Here's our spotlight on a Hustle reader working on something big.   Who: Natalie Getreu What: Hertility Health The elevator pitch: "'Hertility is rebuilding women's healthcare so women don't have to wait years for answers. We offer at-home hormone testing and direct access to specialist clinicians, so you can go from confusion to clarity in days, not decades." The problem they're solving: "Women spend an average of eight years getting diagnosed with a hormone or reproductive health condition because the healthcare system still treats periods, pain, fertility, and menopause like a 'rare disease.'"  One truly innovative thing they're doing: "We're building a first-of-its-kind hormone health dataset across the reproductive lifespan, not just fertility. It's letting us spot patterns in conditions like PCOS, endometriosis, perimenopause, and ovarian aging years earlier than traditional pathways." Advice to a fellow entrepreneur: "The customer is the only one who lives the problem. Everyone else is just commentating from the sidelines." Entrepreneurship advice that's BS: "'Move fast and break things.' In healthcare, if you break things, you break people. Speed is great. Sloppiness can be lethal." What are you working on? Tell us here. AROUND THE WEB 📅  On this day: In 1863, US President Abraham Lincoln delivered his famous Gettysburg Address amid the Civil War. 🖼️   Game: An art history puzzler meant to be played in short bursts (like when you need a little break). 🗞️  Newsletter: Discover essential stories from across Europe, delivered daily by local journalists. 🫁  How to: manage stress with this breathing technique. 🐱  Aww: When the nip hits. SHOWER THOUGHT A Ouija board but with wingdings should still work. SOURCE Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah, Sara Friedman, Singdhi Sokpo, and Jay Fuchs. Editing by: Ben "Twinkle toes" Berkley.   Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here. Working on something big? We've got a whole library of business-building resources for you. Subscribe to our other newsletters Stay up-to-date on AI: Mindstream  |  Expert insights: Masters in Marketing  |  Sell better: The Science of Scaling Follow The Hustle on YouTube, LinkedIn, and Instagram. 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