190 karma · joined November 12, 2015
Noah here from https://meetglimpse.com. It looks like we're tackling a similar problem of surfacing trends, just a bit differently. I'd be super curious to hear more about how you're filtering through the noise. Fun challenge for sure!
Yes, fun stuff to be working on!
We use a number of strategies to cut through the noise. One of strategies that's easiest to articulate is comparing a topic's trend lines on different channels to identify organic growth vs. inorganic growth. This is because we think it’s important to provide high quality trends that aren’t biased by data from one channel.
We're also more inclined to share trends that we think have room to grow, as one of our internal metrics is the growth multiple of all trends we cover.
I think the products that have step function level effects on society are the sum of many smaller trends.
We've found that these trends, however small or large, tend to highlight the bigger picture around how the consumer world is evolving.
Like you point out, axe throwing is not very interesting on its own. But when you take a closer look, axe throwing, escape rooms, etc. are rising to fill the need of real life social experiences that can't be easily replaced by companies like Netflix as the more digitally replicable social experiences like movie theaters decline in popularity.
Our customers - founders, investors, product people, marketers, etc. - tell us that this deeper understanding of how and why the world is changing is useful to them.
And separately, while there are indeed a small number of products that have a disproportionately large impact on society (like the ones you mentioned: car, bike, iPhone), our economy is also largely dependent on the inverse - a large number of products that individually have a small impact on society - many of these are products we use and consume day to day like toiletries.
The growth of products in these potentially less impactful categories can still sometimes highlight a meaningful shift in society and we at Glimpse think it's worth talking about.
Hope I answered your questions!
Truly sustainable trends have healthy growth curves, rarely propped up by huge spikes often caused by PR or unsustainable growth stunts.
If we showed you everything that was happening the day or even week it started to be talked about or searched more than 100 times per day, you'd see a ton of noise, 99% of which would be useless long term.
1. at a non exorbitant cost 2. in a time period where it takes less time than the cycle of information otherwise it's useless by the time the trend is surfaced.
The way it works is we first capture nearly every topic online, then we look at frequency of discussion, searches, shares, etc. around each topic. Beyond just the growth in frequency, our software looks for indicators that a trend is organic and has more room to grow, as it’s important that we surface trends not fads.
There are plenty of tools that help you dive deep on a new trend you’ve heard of, but the problem is you need to have already heard about the trend. This is what we’re solving for - exposure to the unknown unknowns.
As an example, SheIn is growing on Google Trends, but when you compare that to popularity on other sites like Reddit and Twitter, you realize that the large majority of search traffic is driven by people googling after they see an ad.
Surprisingly, nearly all our engineering energy goes into filtering out the noise. Even after this, there’s a good deal of manual work. We’ve found that most of our users don’t want to do this themselves through a tool - they want the insights packaged and delivered, and we think it’s important to provide high quality trends that aren’t biased by data.
While Glimpse started as a way for us to figure out which products we could build and sell online, we realized how helpful it is for founders, investors, product people and marketers to constantly see how consumer behavior, marketing, and products are evolving so they can better do their jobs.
Would love feedback!