Hey everyone, Josh here the creator. As a developer, I’m always looking out for an emerging market trend on which to bootstrap my own SaaS product. This is since market awareness and timing are often so critical, on top of execution skill of course!
So I built Trennd. Under the hood it continually monitors the web for interesting keywords & topics, classifies them using Google Trends data and packages everything as a neat web app where other people can contribute too.
The app itself is built with the Next.js React framework along with Express, Bootstrap and MongoDB. Next.js was new to me, but made sense since it comes with so much out of the box, including server side rendering.
Let me know if you have any questions, and any feedback is much appreciated!
> I have scripts that are crawling the web in places like twitter, reddit and facebook to generate keyword ideas.
So the trends that it detects is biased towards the corners of the web that I am monitoring. Which skew heavily tech!
Of course - I have scripts constantly monitoring the web for potentially interesting keywords. I then check google trends data for that topic/keyword and analyze the gradient of the line of best fit over different timeframes. If the gradient is higher than a certain (arbitrary) amount, then I class it as a trend!
Pretty neat, I see the most granular time scale currently supported is a 3-month window -- are there any plans to increase granularity towards a (near) real-time system? I get your crawler might be rate-limited at that scale and you would likely have to rethink the entire system architecture, but I think real-time data would open up a whole new dimension of possibilities for detecting/predicting trends perhaps even before public awareness catches up. I'd imagine there would be parties interested in paying for that kind of capability if that's the direction you're planning on taking this idea
I'd love to go as granular as possible, at least 30 days. Real-time would be ideal, but as you note - Google Trends rate limiting soon becomes a hurdle especially when you potentially multiply by different geographies.
Awesome I enjoyed making some trend charts, and the results are fun (i.e I added DevOps, Erlang, Elixir). I think there is a risk it could conceal too many errors and biases for it to be useful for trend analysis. Using services like Twitter and Reddit might introduce biases into your data skewing trends. The challenge is using data and not understanding the intent (is it positive, negative or neutral/sarcastic potentially negative/positive). Google Adwords is good at this. I applaud your effort; I hope you keep going but its a tough nut to crack. I use markets like Google Adwords Tools to do this at the moment, have you looked at it? I think more info around time, intent and volume.
Hi, it would be nice if the keywords had short explanations. I had to find out what an affinity designer and an enneagram was. Bubble tea was also quite new.
Hey Josh, very interesting concept. Thanks for building it!
I tried to use the "technology" category, but the results are not what I expected. Perhaps it would be more useful if I could narrow it down to more specific things, e.g. programming languages, or databases.
This definately has a market, but i'm not sure SaaS is it. More typical eCommerce products have a "flavor of the day" like effect, where an article is written in some niche community, and everyone in that community rushes out to buy the thing. Then a few months later, the craze is over. If you're Amazon, you can spot these trends easily (because they have everyone's sales data from the marketplace). If you're a small eCommerce company, unless you just happen to have that product on hand, and someone just happened to have found you, you may never even realize the trend existed. Being alerted that there is a sudden demand for a product, might give you a headstart on marketing and might help you negotiate a deal with a supplier before the supplier realizes what they have.
I'm a moderator of one of the bigger Facebook advertising groups that exist. This caught my eye instantly as the e-commerce and affiliate crowd are going to be all over it. They love being able to catch trends relatively early. This product is ready made built for flavor of the moment marketers.
not sure i agree so much because its not showing things that are just starting to trend, which is where the real money is at... being in front of the ball rather then behind/beside it. best i can tell this service just shows you the search volume history from about 1100 select terms that anyone can already lookup using googles trend tools.
id be much more interested to see terms each day whose search volume has increased 10x or something... that would be very useful for people trying to get in front of trends.
The "flavor of the day" comment really caught my attention, been thinking of a startup between those lines. I think with people having hundreds of decisions to make everyday from a million choices, it would help to answer those questions for the users without them having to spend time deciding.
I mean its great to have review sites, but what should I have for lunch today? what is trending just give me the answer I am happy to pay $5 a month you decide for me. What programming language is trending?
Will look into it at some point, happy to have a chat with anyone who's interested my email is in my profile
Appreciate your insight - really trying to figure out who I should be building this for, so I know what features and direction to focus on. I was thinking eCommerce entrepreneurs could be it, but then a lot of other people potentially find it valuable too. I want to see who keeps coming back to Trennd in the future, the power users, and ask them why/what they're using it for!
Thanks Josh, I sent you an email I think you answered most of the stuff here though just came back to the comments now. Would still be great to have a chat sometime
Very cool! As a front-end dev it's interesting (but I guess also not surprising) to see React and Vue with very steep curves.
I wanted to try adding Svelte, so I signed up by email, but that doesn't seem to be working. Then I tried Sign In With Twitter but, wow, it requires an awful lot of permissions! Among them... Follow new people, Update your profile, and Post Tweets for you. I'd be a lot happier signing in with Twitter if it were limited to read-only abilities.
The key value-add, in my mind, from that product, besides the trend, is the editorial content they include in the email. Of course, that's just me as a layperson.
I'd probably dupe their pricing model and approach: i.e., a limited number of weekly/monthly trends, subscribers get more.
Definitely - the glimpse newsletter looks good and is the same concept of surfacing new Google trends. I didn't like being limited to just a few trends per month everyone else sees via newsletter though.
I was looking for an interactive app with 1000 trends I could dig through. But as you say, then the editorial content/insight for each trend is key value-add. That's part of the reason I've built in for users to be able to add their own trends, insights and comments. If we can crowdsource it, then to some extent we don't have to trade-off quantity and quality.
And/or sell the service where you BYO keyword list and this ranks them. Keyword lists can themselves be scraped from forums and websites in the marked the client is interested. The scraping could also be an add on service.
This would lock in nicely with the keyword research that ahrefs, moz, etc. offer. And other various colour hat seo software.
Selling the data as an API is definitely a potential. I was originally thinking to allow CSV downloads of the data. Would an API be more useful for your client's use case?
You seem to have done most of the hard work, collecting the data. I'm not sure they'd care what format the data was in. Providing it could be expanded to cover the topics their clients need.
It's interesting to see that topics like 'fentanyl', 'opiod' have done up.
Also 'criminal defenses', 'wrongful death claim' have gone up a lot as well - Perhaps they are related to spikes in searches for plastic surgery topics.
Also it's weird why almost all the topics on the front page are related to software development. It's like there is some kind of conspiracy to turn the world's population into software developers.
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So I built Trennd. Under the hood it continually monitors the web for interesting keywords & topics, classifies them using Google Trends data and packages everything as a neat web app where other people can contribute too.
The app itself is built with the Next.js React framework along with Express, Bootstrap and MongoDB. Next.js was new to me, but made sense since it comes with so much out of the box, including server side rendering.
Let me know if you have any questions, and any feedback is much appreciated!
Also, if you are choosing the keywords then wouldn't the data be inaccurate for predicting trends as trends occur randomly?
So the trends that it detects is biased towards the corners of the web that I am monitoring. Which skew heavily tech!
I'm working on something similar for a internal tool, so I'm curious to see what your solution is.
Thanks!
It can probably be used for lots of things: startups, as you mentioned, but also journalism ideas, investing ideas, job hunting and many more.
> built with the Next.js React framework
Wait wait wait... do you mean to say there's now a framework for a framework? Javascriptland continues to confound.
I tried to use the "technology" category, but the results are not what I expected. Perhaps it would be more useful if I could narrow it down to more specific things, e.g. programming languages, or databases.
Keep up the good work!
If I were to build Trennd towards these e-commerce guys, what would you improve/add/change to make them love it?
id be much more interested to see terms each day whose search volume has increased 10x or something... that would be very useful for people trying to get in front of trends.
I mean its great to have review sites, but what should I have for lunch today? what is trending just give me the answer I am happy to pay $5 a month you decide for me. What programming language is trending?
Will look into it at some point, happy to have a chat with anyone who's interested my email is in my profile
I wanted to try adding Svelte, so I signed up by email, but that doesn't seem to be working. Then I tried Sign In With Twitter but, wow, it requires an awful lot of permissions! Among them... Follow new people, Update your profile, and Post Tweets for you. I'd be a lot happier signing in with Twitter if it were limited to read-only abilities.
The key value-add, in my mind, from that product, besides the trend, is the editorial content they include in the email. Of course, that's just me as a layperson.
I'd probably dupe their pricing model and approach: i.e., a limited number of weekly/monthly trends, subscribers get more.
I was looking for an interactive app with 1000 trends I could dig through. But as you say, then the editorial content/insight for each trend is key value-add. That's part of the reason I've built in for users to be able to add their own trends, insights and comments. If we can crowdsource it, then to some extent we don't have to trade-off quantity and quality.
I am currently working with a client who is exploring the options for building out a similar system.
This would lock in nicely with the keyword research that ahrefs, moz, etc. offer. And other various colour hat seo software.
No idea what that means, but it suggests why you're not seeing the same data.
Also 'criminal defenses', 'wrongful death claim' have gone up a lot as well - Perhaps they are related to spikes in searches for plastic surgery topics.
Also it's weird why almost all the topics on the front page are related to software development. It's like there is some kind of conspiracy to turn the world's population into software developers.