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How to Spot Business Trends Before They Happen — and Capitalize on Them
The Hustle’s formula for identifying big business opportunities
Sam Parr is the founder and CEO of The Hustle, a daily newsletter for entrepreneurs with over 1.5 million subscribers.
Parr and his team recently launched Trends, a paid newsletter and community featuring deep-dive industry reports with actionable insights, exclusive interviews with founders, and case studies with helpful analysis.
At a price tag of $299 annually, Trends shot out of the gate on launch day and logged thousands of sales in the first few days.
Sam put together a document with thoughts to help writers spot trends. The document, summarized below and shared with permission, outlines a process for spotting high-potential industry opportunities and how entrepreneurs and investors can capitalize on them before they make their way to the mainstream.
“One thing I’ve noticed when we’ve interviewed people is that most people aren’t great at sniffing out opportunity,” says Sam.
“So I’m trying to create a framework to help our writers spot Trends. Here are some initial thoughts.”
What is a business trend?
It’s a gap in the market, or an opportunity to create a company, which I define as a group of people working together to profitably get a product into a customer’s hands.
Put simply, spotting trends means sniffing out value:
Value = Product offering + eyeballs
So how do we use that definition to spot trends?
Get a product into a customer’s hands
Distribution and creating something people want… those are the two principal factors of products.
It’s not just about creating a product, but making sure you can get that product to the market.
Because of this, distribution must be baked into a product.
How do you profitably get your product into the customer’s hands? You do it with three components.
- Sales team — Is there enough margin so…
