jhow15

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.

Fantastic Marie! The website is very sleek + nice, and the community itself looks awesome.

Hi everyone, I used the YC top companies list for 2019 as a source for the company names to use (https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/).

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!

Ahh - thank you!

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.

Thanks for flagging this up!

This is exactly it. Thanks for laying it out so clearly :)

Thank you - glad you enjoyed it!

Yeah you can subscribe to stay updated here: https://explodingtopics.com/subscribe

We're going to make that much more prominent in the future, currently it's in the footer :)

And yeah, unreadit.com is awesome and Fab the guy who made it's a really nice guy!

Ahaha... I didn't know how to explain that better...

We both waved our hands up and down in the air like a handshake but we only had video... is there a name for that?! :D

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.

Hahaha - thank you! I did want to have the story on paper for myself to look back on, but some traffic is a nice bonus :)

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.

Hahaha - maybe he did! Completely agree it has huge potential. But I think I came out of it well too and still have a revenue stake :)

Ahah - I like that. That's what I'm going to say from now on :)

I'm glad I could help :) You should go for it!

Thank you so much!

That's actually exactly why I built it in the first place, so definitely going to be "eating my own dog food" with this for the next project idea :)

Thank you!!

Thank you! And congrats on selling your side projects too :)

You're pretty close there yeah - so it was a huge win! Especially given it had no revenue like you say.

Hi everyone, Josh here the writer.

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.

This seems like a great opportunity to grab that twitter handle you always wanted.

Alright - thank you!

I think it really depends on the trend. Some can be spikes or fads especially in fashion or food. But equally, some keep rising and turn out to be part of broader industry trends that you regret not getting in when you first discovered them. The hard thing is spotting the difference!

Yeah right now there is a tech bias since the scripts and sources on the backend are focussed more on that.

Thanks!! It's based on regression analysis of the topic's data.

Thank you! I'd recommend filtering by 12months or less or selecting the "exponential" trends filter type to surface the hottest stuff.

I had the same question recently and so built an app to surface rapidly growing google trends.

It was a Show HN project not long ago and people seemed to like it: https://trennd.co

I've also noticed a lot of larger trends that other commenters have highlighted too:

- data privacy focussed products (DuckDuckGo/SimpleAnalytics)

- everything machine learning

- meat substitutes

- alternative forms of entertainment (axe throwing/escape rooms)

I’m always surprised how, in my experience at least, people with less exposure to animals usually underestimate their ability to understand their surroundings and even feel emotions.

Yeah that makes a lot of sense to compare trend lines across channels - thanks for sharing!

Hey Noah, great work with Glimpse!

Josh here from https://trennd.co/ which I recently built and launched on Show HN too. We're tackling the same problem of surfacing new trends, just in different ways!

Interested to hear more about how you validate trends and reduce noise. I'm inclined to agree that this is the biggest challenge. I'm guessing it's a lot of manual verification on your end?