Fifty Shades of Grey started as a phenomenon in a small community of influential mums in New York. Discord, now valued at $3.5bn, was born in the League of Legends sub-reddit from the frustration with the existing in-game chat apps like Teamspeak. Dopamine detoxing, now a major movement, started as a small, but quickly growing community on Reddit, reflecting the increasing awareness of the negative effects social media has on mental health. Digital detoxes became mainstream after Netflix’s The Social Dilemma.

There are signs of such small, but rapidly growing communities, cultural phenomena and topics all across the internet. But it takes a skill and a trained eye to spot them.

What readers are saying

“ Probably the only author I would read anything he writes.”

“ …the Numinus Wellness stock has almost doubled since I bought it because of your newsletter, so thank you 🙏🏻“

“My friend is starting a pet nutrition company focused around packaging re-use and ingredient transparency based on some insight you provided in the letter.”

What to expect

Every week I write about upcoming topics in consumer goods and e-commerce with the potential to become big or to be reflective of a macro trend. I focus on trends at early stages with less than ten thousand searches every month. To the best of my knowledge, no other trends research company consistently focuses on such early stages.

To give some examples, I spotted the initial signals around Veganuary (search interest up by 300% over 4 years), Oura ring (raised $28 million, used by the NBA) and many more trends as early as 4 years ago.

More recently I have spotted trends that have become much bigger or grown in awareness, like Frenchic Paint and curtain bangs.

Paid subscribers get:

• 5 - 8 trends every week, across search, Reddit, TikTok, IG, Amazon and other relevant platforms. All weekly trends come with in-depth insights on the origination and direction of the trend along with ideas on opportunities they create.

• Interviews with experts on relevant topics in CPG and e-commerce.

• Access to custom requests (drop me an email and I’ll look into a topic of your interest i.e. go find you trends in that specific area).

• Weekly trend drops (~30 graphs of rising search queries or communities).

Other readers get:

• Around one email a month, featuring 5-8 trends

• One trends drop a month (~30 graphs of rising search queries or communities)

• Occasional interviews.

How does it work?

We computationally monitor thousands of search topics across different industries and machine learning algorithms sort out the noise and detect exponential patterns. I then do a deep dive research on them, cross validating across different channels and assessing the potential for the trend to become big.

I aim to understand the root cause of the topic growth, the problems and frustrations it solves or displays and where it is headed. I also like to look at different opportunities that can be exploited regarding the topic.

Let’s chat

If you would like to view some examples of past paid letters, please reach out to me at robert@profeciaresearch.co.uk and I can send you some samples.

To find out more about Profecia, visit profeciaresearch.co.uk