Trends Podcast

Google paid $10 million for bankrupt Spirit Airlines' 100 million emails and 500 million Teams messages, outbidding Mercor at auction. Closing startups sell the same kind of records with no bidding contest, which is the opening for a founder who runs one. Featuring: Google, Mercor, Spirit Airlines, SimpleClosure, Korra, MIT Technology Review Watch on YouTube Read the full report Brought to you by:...

ChatGPT can plan a trip in a group chat and forget it a month later. Jarvie raised $8.3 million to build the group chat AI that remembers. The opening for a small company is one kind of group that plans the same thing each week, like the parents on a youth sports team. Featuring: Jarvie, Shapes, Series, Continua, Instinct, Lightspeed Watch on YouTube Read the full report Brought to you by: Trends....

Testers cut the AI assistant Instinct off from their email and it kept summarizing their inbox anyway. The fastest-moving agents ask for less of you, and freelancers chasing late invoices are the buyer Paraglide skips. Featuring: Instinct, TechCrunch, Accenture, Wajo, Google, Meta, Stripe, Shop Pay, Ollie, Vellum, Paraglide, Invoice Ninja, FreshBooks, InvoiceWatchr, Upwork Watch on YouTube Read th...

Viktor, an AI coworker a team shares in its chat app, went from launch to a $15 million run rate in three months, and Slack has announced an agent of its own. Agencies that keep a separate chat with each client are the opening for a small company. Featuring: Viktor, AlphaSignal, Accel, Slack, Pylon, ClearFeed Watch on YouTube Read the full report Brought to you by: Trends.vc : Discover new markets...

Tomo signed tens of thousands of people paying about $20 a month for an AI that texts them before they skip. With Photon and the open-source Hermes agent, one person could build a coach like it for one goal, starting with marathon training. Featuring: Tomo, Bain Capital Ventures, Instinct, OpenAI, Poppy, Photon, Hermes, Iris, TechCrunch, Apple, Meta, Martin Watch on YouTube Read the full report Br...

Noah Shinn's free assistant, Instinct, texts you before you ask, and investors valued it at $10 billion 33 days after a $2.5 billion round. Real-estate agents who earn from past clients are a buyer a small team could sell a version of it to now. Featuring: Noah Shinn, Instinct, Sequoia, Benchmark, OpenAI, Meta, Sierra, Structurely, Compass, Martin Tobias Watch on YouTube Read the full report Broug...

Amazon locked Meta's new shopping agent, Muse, out of its store twelve days after launch, and Shopify opened about a million stores to it the next day. The brands those agents skip are the opening. Featuring: Meta, Amazon, Shopify, ReFiBuy, Azoma, Mark Zuckerberg, Tobi Lütke, Ben Thompson Watch on YouTube Read the full report Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities. ht...

A game where pigs ride a conveyor belt made its 20-person Istanbul studio worth more than $1 billion. How Pixel Flow went from a paper-and-pen test to more than a million dollars a day, and why Scopely bought in. Featuring: Kübra Gündoğan, Emre Çelik, Loom Games, Pixel Flow, Scopely Watch on YouTube Read the full report Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities. https://...

A Roblox game about stealing eggs from pets hit six billion visits in nine weeks, three days before Roblox let players type a game into its phone app. Why the startups that sold that prompt box first now sell playable ads to online shops instead. Featuring: Roblox, Steal An Egg, Astrocade, AppLovin, Adam Foroughi, Playables AI, Rosebud Watch on YouTube Read the full report Brought to you by: Trend...

A Squid Game knockoff typed into a prompt box hit 3.5 million plays in four weeks on Astrocade, an app that pays makers $100 when it picks their game and then pays on plays. What that feed pays, what it said about a $10 million creator fund and what can take the money away. Featuring: Astrocade, Roblox, Rec Room, Sequoia, David Cahn, Lovable, Bolt, Unity Watch on YouTube Read the full report Broug...

Faladdin sells a million coffee-cup readings a day out of Istanbul at about 90% margin. The buyer rates the reading on how they felt when it ended, so a model that never met them can do the job. The business that survives the regulators is the one that says on the page what the reading is. Featuring: Faladdin, AstroSage, Nebula, Astrotalk, Co-Star, FTC Watch on YouTube Read the full report Brought...

One engineer sold the loading line developers stare at inside Claude Code and served 100 million ads on a surface he does not own. Six networks copied him in a month, two are already dead, and the wait they sell is shrinking. Featuring: Andrew McCalip, Kickbacks, Anthropic, Claude Code, Codebacks, Idlen, Idle Dev, AdGuard, Gravity, Perplexity, Time, Ally Bank, Ramp, Linear, Varda Space Watch on Yo...

An operator put his agent on seven AI job boards in one night and it won 192 tasks for $0. The boards that do pay run money through a rail that reaches a bank account the owner controls. Featuring: TaskMarket, MoltJobs, Execution Market, Superteam Earn, dealwork, Toku, TaskBounty, Upwork, Stripe Watch on YouTube Read the full report Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunit...

35+ hosting companies launched in weeks around a single open-source project. An 18-year-old hit $17K MRR in 5 days, listed for $2.25M, slashed to $225K the next day. The wrapper bubble is already deflating. This episode covers the OpenClaw hosting landscape: who survives the consolidation, why forks like PicoClaw and ZeroClaw are creating entirely new markets on $10 hardware, and where the durable...

In this episode, we're going to talk about programmatic SEO. This is about how businesses get customers by creating lots of pages aimed at specific topics. They use tools and AI to make content. We'll look into where SEO is heading, like more use of no-code tools, more competition for less common keywords, and how to deal with searches that don't lead to clicks. We'll give you tips and talk about...

In this episode, we're going to look at how influencer marketing is changing and what it might be like in the future. We'll explore how brands are promoting themselves differently now, find out how to use trust and attention to your advantage, and learn about the good and bad things in this exciting area. We'll talk about the growing trend of virtual influencers and why using data is important. Th...

In this podcast episode, we're going to talk about making money from open-source projects. We'll talk about the problems of being stuck with one vendor and how to make money from open-source work. We'll look at what might happen in the future, like big new projects, networks owned by users, and changes in digital items and smart contracts. We'll explore how working on open-source projects can help...

In this episode, we're looking at how no-code tools are changing the way software is developed. We'll see how these tools make it easier to work with things like web3, machine learning, and creating games. They're changing how people work and making it cheaper to develop software. We'll talk about how this could lead to more specialized products, one-person businesses making a lot of money, and mo...

In this episode, we're going to talk about fractional ownership. This means owning a part of something valuable, like big buildings or digital items like NFTs. We'll see how breaking up these big investments into smaller parts makes it possible for more people to invest in things that used to be out of reach. We'll talk about how this could lead to more user-owned networks and good chances for bot...

In this podcast episode, we're diving into the FIRE movement, which stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early. We'll look at the different ways you can do it, the risks, and the good things that come with it. We'll talk about how being financially independent isn't just about stopping work early, but also about managing different kinds of wealth well. We'll cover things like the 4% rule and...

In this episode, we're going to talk about on-demand manufacturing and how it's changing things. We'll see how building trust and telling stories can make products more valuable. We'll also look at how this way of making things reduces the risks of having too much inventory, wasting money, and market uncertainties. We'll explore how local manufacturing and automation are growing, and how it's easi...

In this podcast episode, we're going to explore the Creator Economy. We'll see how technology is making it easier for people to start their own businesses without needing big companies. We'll talk about how creators are now more valuable than before and how things are changing. We'll look at how people share their content, guess what might happen with technology behind the scenes, and discuss user...

In this episode, we'll talk about how companies are changing from focusing on sales to focusing on their products to grow. We'll look at why it's getting more expensive to get new customers and how things are more than just about product features. We'll see how sales-led growth and product-led growth are different. Companies like Canva, Slack, and Notion are leading the way by making products that...

In this episode, we look at the world of micro private equity as it revolutionizes business acquisitions. See why buying existing businesses is gaining momentum over starting from scratch and how this trend leverages the value of time in generating wealth. Dive into predictions forecasting increased financing options, the impact of analytics tools on due diligence and the surge in deal velocity. U...

Discover the evolving landscape of consulting in this podcast episode. Dive into the significance of consultants guiding clients versus contractors fulfilling specific tasks. Explore the emerging opportunities in specialized consulting, fractional roles and productized services, along with strategies to build a value ladder and leverage top-of-funnel content. Learn about the nuances of pricing, cl...