Hey everyone, founder here. A few friends and I built Glimpse to surface trending topics - companies, products, industries, everything - and we send out curated trend reports via email.
The way it works is we first capture nearly every topic online, then we look at frequency of discussion, searches, shares, etc. around each topic. Beyond just the growth in frequency, our software looks for indicators that a trend is organic and has more room to grow, as it’s important that we surface trends not fads.
There are plenty of tools that help you dive deep on a new trend you’ve heard of, but the problem is you need to have already heard about the trend. This is what we’re solving for - exposure to the unknown unknowns.
As an example, SheIn is growing on Google Trends, but when you compare that to popularity on other sites like Reddit and Twitter, you realize that the large majority of search traffic is driven by people googling after they see an ad.
Surprisingly, nearly all our engineering energy goes into filtering out the noise. Even after this, there’s a good deal of manual work. We’ve found that most of our users don’t want to do this themselves through a tool - they want the insights packaged and delivered, and we think it’s important to provide high quality trends that aren’t biased by data.
While Glimpse started as a way for us to figure out which products we could build and sell online, we realized how helpful it is for founders, investors, product people and marketers to constantly see how consumer behavior, marketing, and products are evolving so they can better do their jobs.
Hi there! As the former head of product for a tool in a related space, I'm curious how you're handling the high data costs involved in building these businesses?
Personally, I think you guys are trying to upsell too early. I would hide the upsell more and focus more on converting subscribers and delivering more value up front.
Except it appears we do filtering very differently. Our system also suggests points to enter and leave a given asset based on the information.
It’s a pretty hard and crowded space. Feel free to look at some of my repos and blog posts, might shed some light on how to improve your system. Although your UI/UX is far superior
Maybe I do not understand something about your system (or how all of this is supposed to work). When I view companies/dashboards/the buy/sell and stock price screen, lots of data is from June? Some of the charts for a company show current information, but the top chart always stops at June? Is this right?
Hi, do you track HN frontpage too? Glimpse sounds good, at the moment I use https://trennd.co, glad to see you are both building interesting solutions.
$29/mo | Every month | 7 Exponential Trends | 3 Exponential+ Trends | Before-It-Happens alerts | Get last 2 reports on signup | Insights for each trend
$479/mo | Every month | 10 Exponential Trends | 5 Exponential+ Trends | Before-It-Happens alerts | Get last 3 reports on signup | Insights for each trend | Add your team members
Looks fantastic, and very good to hear (related to my neuroscience courses in college) that you found filtering to be a primary issue -- you're on to something.
At first glance, the subscriptions seem to offer certain numbers of new trends. Is there a way to say that we're looking for new trends in some type of topic, vs whatever trends come up in your general scan? (feel free to tell me to read further if I've missed something)
I'd suggest a trial period before commitment - free plan doesn't seem to have enough included to make opinion about your product and decide which option to go with later.
2 weeks trial on each plan would be enough I believe.
Hi! Thanks for sharing. I would love to know what an 'Exponential+ Trend' is. It's no clear from the landing page and I can't find any links to more information about this. Congrats!
Hi Aaron! We define an Exponential+ Trend just as one that is growing much faster than normal. We used to call these "Hyper Growth Trends" but we tested and found that Exponential+ was more clear.
I really like the idea. It is like an aggregator of internet trends on different topics. I can imagine many use cases where it is helpful. (Not just marketing and PR.)
I checked your site but didn't get if you can search those trends by keywords. My area is quite niche so going throught the list of topics can take quite a long time.
I'm in the same boat -- stop sending me emails. If your tool is based on email, I'm not going to use it.
Why does it matter that the comment is directed at the founder? No sense in screaming at a customer service rep to change company vision/direction/policy.
So, assuming you're interested receiving these reports, how do you propose they send them to you then?
SMS? Fax? PDF printed and sent via snail mail? Facebook Message? Randomly logging in to their website to check if a new report is out?
I always hear people complain about how many emails they get but I never understand it. I guess most people just passively give out their email address to everybody and are surprised when it gets out of hand. If you use apple mail the unsubscribe button is at the very top of every email.
I viciously unsubscribe to anything I don't want, and because of this, email is my preferred method of accessing content on the internet. No crazy JS, no pop up ads, no loading 50 different trackers, no social media viral outrage, just a self-curated stream of content I want.
NowPublic did a tool like that in 2008 intended for the use of newsrooms but we never got a single subscriber, every newsroom we showed immediately wanted to acquire the company :D Eventually one did. It was a relatively primitive affair extracting information from the Twitter gardenhose with Stanford NLP and storing / retrieving with Xapian. There was nothing like that at the time as far as I am aware.
Very cool! And yes, all the data is out there and is public, it's just a problem of filtering through the noise to get the signal. Because < 0.01% of topics discussed online are sustainable trends, it can take a bit of engineering work to do this all...
1. at a non exorbitant cost
2. in a time period where it takes less time than the cycle of information otherwise it's useless by the time the trend is surfaced.
Ask away. Here's what the public knew at the time of Scan: https://mashable.com/2008/09/19/nowpublic-blog-scan/ and here's the acquisition https://venturebeat.com/2009/09/01/examinercom-snaps-up-citi... I will try to answer but if there's real interest, I haven't lost contact with the old team so we could perhaps do a Reddit AMA . Maybe? It's not so interesting after so long, really. Well, now I Google'd it I now remember we used MongoDB for initial storage, that was quite an early use for it and frankly ideal because we just needed to store quickly and if a few tweets got lost, big deal...
More analytics. I feel like these are an admission that you are unable to judge quality in any meaningful way, so you're just going to go with what's popular today.
If I look around the products I own, and especially the ones I enjoy and find useful, I don't see very many which could have been arrived at by the wisdom of the crowds. You're not going to create a car that way, or a bicycle, or an iPhone. That's just not how products are created.
What exactly does one do with the knowledge that "Axe throwing" and "Gut health" searches are way up this year? "Stay in touch with the world beyond your bubble" sounds rather vague, and the sort of thing I could get by going on Twitter once a week.
I think the products that have step function level effects on society are the sum of many smaller trends.
We've found that these trends, however small or large, tend to highlight the bigger picture around how the consumer world is evolving.
Like you point out, axe throwing is not very interesting on its own. But when you take a closer look, axe throwing, escape rooms, etc. are rising to fill the need of real life social experiences that can't be easily replaced by companies like Netflix as the more digitally replicable social experiences like movie theaters decline in popularity.
Our customers - founders, investors, product people, marketers, etc. - tell us that this deeper understanding of how and why the world is changing is useful to them.
And separately, while there are indeed a small number of products that have a disproportionately large impact on society (like the ones you mentioned: car, bike, iPhone), our economy is also largely dependent on the inverse - a large number of products that individually have a small impact on society - many of these are products we use and consume day to day like toiletries.
The growth of products in these potentially less impactful categories can still sometimes highlight a meaningful shift in society and we at Glimpse think it's worth talking about.
I just signed up for the $29/mo plan. I appreciate that I immediately received the June and July newsletters. In the July one, there is a good idea that is very relevant to my wife's business (she owns a chain of hair salons). Thanks for making this, it's really cool!
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?
We use a number of strategies to cut through the noise. One of strategies that's easiest to articulate is comparing a topic's trend lines on different channels to identify organic growth vs. inorganic growth. This is because we think it’s important to provide high quality trends that aren’t biased by data from one channel.
We're also more inclined to share trends that we think have room to grow, as one of our internal metrics is the growth multiple of all trends we cover.
Exceedingly few trends - whether companies, products, industries, etc. become popular overnight.
Truly sustainable trends have healthy growth curves, rarely propped up by huge spikes often caused by PR or unsustainable growth stunts.
If we showed you everything that was happening the day or even week it started to be talked about or searched more than 100 times per day, you'd see a ton of noise, 99% of which would be useless long term.
I understand that this is true in general but you can add intelligence to the process and filter the noise (even with errors). For example, if there is a disease that is propagating (e.g. flu) you can understand that this trend means something different than a music show trend that sparks around a specufic event.
The way it works is we first capture nearly every topic online, then we look at frequency of discussion, searches, shares, etc. around each topic. Beyond just the growth in frequency, our software looks for indicators that a trend is organic and has more room to grow, as it’s important that we surface trends not fads.
There are plenty of tools that help you dive deep on a new trend you’ve heard of, but the problem is you need to have already heard about the trend. This is what we’re solving for - exposure to the unknown unknowns.
As an example, SheIn is growing on Google Trends, but when you compare that to popularity on other sites like Reddit and Twitter, you realize that the large majority of search traffic is driven by people googling after they see an ad.
Surprisingly, nearly all our engineering energy goes into filtering out the noise. Even after this, there’s a good deal of manual work. We’ve found that most of our users don’t want to do this themselves through a tool - they want the insights packaged and delivered, and we think it’s important to provide high quality trends that aren’t biased by data.
While Glimpse started as a way for us to figure out which products we could build and sell online, we realized how helpful it is for founders, investors, product people and marketers to constantly see how consumer behavior, marketing, and products are evolving so they can better do their jobs.
Would love feedback!