How to spot a market trend before your competitors do

By the time a trend has a name, a report, and a conference track, it is not a trend. It is consensus, and consensus is worth nothing, because everyone in your category read the same report you did.

The useful version arrives much earlier and looks much less impressive.

Trends start as workarounds

Here is the shape of an early trend, and it is not a shape people find exciting.

Someone is doing something stupid and laborious to solve a problem, because no proper solution exists. They are exporting to a spreadsheet and hand-editing it. They are running two tools that do not talk to each other and copying between them. They are paying an intern to do something a machine should do.

That is the earliest visible form of a market. Not a report. A workaround.

When you see several unrelated people building the same ugly workaround, something is missing, and eventually someone will build it properly. That is the trend, eighteen months before it has a name.

Listen at the edges

The most useful customers for this are the ones you are slightly wrong for.

Your perfect-fit customers will tell you to make the thing you already make, but better. That is useful for the roadmap and useless for spotting anything.

The customer who almost fits, who is using your product for something you did not intend, who keeps asking for a thing that seems out of scope, that person is standing at the boundary of your market telling you where it is about to move.

Most companies filter these people out as noise, because they are not the ICP. They are noise, right up until they are the market.

Analyst reports are for confirming, not spotting

They are not useless. They are just late by construction.

An analyst writes about a trend once it is large enough to be worth writing about, which means once your competitors are already doing it. Reading the report tells you what everybody now knows.

Useful for checking your read. Useless as a source of advantage, since advantage requires knowing something before others do, and a published report is definitionally the opposite of that.

The fake-trend filter

Most things that look like trends are stories, and stories are cheap.

One question sorts them: is anyone currently spending real money or real hours solving this badly?

If yes, there is a market. Pain that costs something is real pain, and someone will eventually pay to make it stop.

If nobody is doing anything about it, if the only evidence is that people say it sounds important, then you have found a topic, not a market. Topics generate a great deal of discussion and almost no revenue.

The part where you actually do something

And here is the failure that makes all of the above pointless.

Most people who spot a trend early do nothing about it. They notice, they feel clever, they mention it in a meeting, and eighteen months later when a competitor launches the thing, they say we saw that coming.

Seeing it coming is worth exactly nothing. It is the cheapest form of being right, and it is available to anyone who reads carefully and commits to nothing.

The advantage is not in noticing. It is in the uncomfortable bit where you have to bet on it while it still looks like a weird complaint from a customer who does not quite fit.