Business of Trend Forecasting, Pickleball And The Lucrative Virtual Gaming World

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
But I actually think there's an interesting business where you can look at anything that someone is having to spend a substantial sum today for something that's gonna happen in 12 or 36 months, and you help them guess the right prediction, you can build an interesting business. And I'm gonna give you an example.

**Sam Parr** (0:27)
Okay, so let's do it. What topics you got today?

**Shaan Puri** (0:30)
All right, I've got one idea based on something you sent me.

**Sam Parr** (0:33)
Oh, wow, we're rich.

**Shaan Puri** (0:35)
Yeah, but you...

**Sam Parr** (0:37)
Thanks, Sam, for having one idea based on something I sent you. Sounds like you really put in the work today.

**Shaan Puri** (0:43)
Look, I'm in the final interview stage for my new researcher.
But you told me last time you had a lot, and just hear me out. So you sent me this thing called exploding topics, right? Yeah. And you said, the traffic's killing it. And exploding topics, do you wanna explain what it is?

**Sam Parr** (1:00)
Yeah, it's basically like a, if you go to the website, you'll see a series of charts. And the charts are basically saying, hey, this thing, this trend is growing in popularity.

**Shaan Puri** (1:14)
I think it started by which keywords were growing in popularity, because Brian Dean, who owned Backlinko, a popular SEO blog, got involved with it. And then it kind of changed to what it is now.

**Sam Parr** (1:24)
Okay, yeah, so I didn't know what the underlying, what are they looking at to tell you what's trending or not. But they'll be like, hey, there's this thing called Power Dash. It's a vacuum cleaner for pet owners.
It's grown 3000% right now. But the volume of that search is 320, so not huge. Regenerative agriculture, growing 658% with 12,000 searches.
And you can look at that and you'd be like, huh, that's cool, I'm interested in that topic. Maybe there's something I could do here. So I think it's similar to what Trends was, which was I will tell you about things that are getting more popular before they're fully popular in order for you to take advantage of them with content, business, that sort of thing. Right, that's the idea?

**Shaan Puri** (2:06)
Yes, and the people wondering Trends, so basically I used to own, I sold it, I used to own this thing called trends.co and it was a weekly email on an online community that people would pay $300 a year for and we got it.
I forget what it was when I sold it, but I think it was at like six million a year, but it very easily could have been like a million a month or so in revenue. But basically we would send a weekly email and we had three or two researchers and they would comb the web and find interesting things and they would write interesting reports and they would also include one to two graphics that showed like here's based off of Reddit searches or based off of Google searches or based off of like 20 different data points, this topic is growing quickly. Anyway, what Exploding Topics is doing, there's another company called Meet Glimpse. So I think it's meetglimpse.co or.com, I don't know.
And this is just called Trends Forecasting and these versions of it, including my version, they're what I would call prosumer. So people who just wanna spend $10 to $300 a month on it, they're not that big of a deal.
But there's this whole other industry of people willing to spend 25, 100,000, 10 million a year, all on Trend Forecasting.
And I think it's a very interesting business model. And I think it's a very underdeveloped industry. And so the one that I brought up a whole bunch is called WGSN. WGSN, it's basically a monthly report that comes out and it helps people pick which colors are gonna be popular, which sounds trivial, but that's a really big deal. If you're Starbucks and you gotta go and buy 10 million name tags or something like that, and you wanna make sure that you've got like a good color that is like hit. Or for example, WGSN, do you remember, Shaan, how pineapple was popular? They helped predict that pineapple, the logo is gonna be popular. Their next one, I think is the lemon. I think they said lemon is gonna be popular. Maybe you told me that actually. And so anyway, that's what this does. But I actually think there's an interesting business where you can look at anything that someone is having to spend a substantial sum today for something that's gonna happen in 12 or 36 months.