Hey everyone, Josh here, one of the creators of this report.
I posted a while back about how I built and sold my show HN trend-spotting tool, Exploding Topics, in 6 months. Since it was an acqui-hire, I’ve still been working on the tool and improving how it works.
(Partly thanks to the great feedback you guys gave me!)
And I spent all last week using it to figure out what the long-term impacts of COVID-19 might be.
Specifically what new business opportunities have been accelerated by the virus… and are outlasting the lockdowns.
There are some pretty surprising ones. Check it out and let me know what you think.
Then I’ve ranked them by Google search volume growth over the last 10 years (ie. the gradient in the charts).
I did have to exclude some companies from the source list if they have names similar to common everyday keywords. This is because it’s hard to attribute specific search numbers to the company or the other meaning, like for example “Front”.
Any other questions about the data or anything just let me know!
Yeah you're spot on with those data limitations. I think the easiest solution would be to just store the more recent, granular data and accumulate that over time. But now way to get granular historical as far as I'm aware.
Right now that's because of my founder bias, but we're looking to include more and more types of topics across health, business, marketing, fashion and so on.
Hi there, the graphs do actually match up - it's just the Google Trends default time period is usually different to ours. Plus the width and height of their charts make the chart gradients look flatter than ours :)
Thank you! Yeah that's part of the secret sauce... but what I can say is that we monitor lots of different places: search, shopping, online communities looking for interesting topics and then we cross-check that against Google Trends data and curate topics ourselves.
I’d like to give thanks to all the people here on Hacker News who supported the project during that launch and any questions or comments just let me know!
The short version (summarized from the article):
I spent 2 months building an app to detect trends. Launched as a Show HN and reached #1 on Hacker News (briefly!). Another 4 months growing and improving it but failed to monetize. But I got enough traction to get acquired by Brian Dean founder of Backlinko.
I posted a while back about how I built and sold my show HN trend-spotting tool, Exploding Topics, in 6 months. Since it was an acqui-hire, I’ve still been working on the tool and improving how it works.
(Partly thanks to the great feedback you guys gave me!)
And I spent all last week using it to figure out what the long-term impacts of COVID-19 might be.
Specifically what new business opportunities have been accelerated by the virus… and are outlasting the lockdowns.
There are some pretty surprising ones. Check it out and let me know what you think.