In 2019, I watched a handful of magic performers start using social media not just to promote shows but to sell digital effects directly to other magicians. No distributor. No retailer. Direct to consumer. Most people in the magic world dismissed it as a niche experiment. By 2022, it was the dominant distribution model, and the companies that missed the shift were scrambling.
I’m not claiming I saw it perfectly. But I saw it early enough to position Vulpine Creations for direct sales from day one, and that decision shaped everything about how the business operated — from margin structure to customer relationships to the eventual exit in 2024.
Spotting trends isn’t about predicting the future. It’s about noticing what’s already happening on the edges and understanding which signals will scale. After 20+ years in innovation consulting and running the Startup Burgenland accelerator, I’ve developed a set of indicators I watch for. None of them are foolproof. But together, they’ve helped me and the founders I work with make better timing decisions.
The Difference Between Trends and Fads
First, let’s separate the useful from the useless.
A fad is driven by attention. It spikes fast, generates a lot of noise, and disappears when the next thing comes along. Think of most viral products: they capture attention but don’t change behavior.
A trend is driven by behavior change. It builds slowly, often starting with a small group of committed early users, and it persists because it solves a real problem better than the existing approach.
The indicator I use: ask whether the adoption is driven by utility or novelty. If people use something because it’s new and interesting, it’s probably a fad. If people use it because it makes their life measurably better and they’d be annoyed to lose it, it’s probably a trend.
AI-assisted workflows are a trend. People aren’t using them because AI is novel — they’re using them because the work gets done in a fraction of the time. That’s behavior change.
Indicator 1: Early Adopters Are Building on Top of It
When technically-minded people start building tools, extensions, and workflows on top of a new technology or platform, pay attention. That’s not passive consumption — that’s investment. People invest time in things they believe have staying power.
Look at developer communities, no-code builder forums, and niche subreddits. When you see people creating tutorials, plugins, integrations, and custom implementations, the underlying thing they’re building on is likely heading mainstream.
Before Shopify was everywhere, independent developers were building Shopify themes and apps. Before Notion became a standard tool, power users were creating elaborate template systems. The builder ecosystem precedes the mainstream adoption by 12-24 months.
Your action: Identify something you’ve noticed early adopters building on. Look at the tools being created around it. If the ecosystem is growing (more templates, more integrations, more tutorials every month), you’re looking at a trend with momentum.
Indicator 2: Behavior Change in Adjacent Markets
Trends rarely stay contained. When a behavior change takes hold in one market, it usually spreads to adjacent ones.
Remote work started in tech companies. Then it spread to professional services. Then to education. Then to healthcare. Each wave happened 6-18 months after the previous one. If you were paying attention to the tech company shift, you had a significant head start in building solutions for the later adopters.
The same pattern played out with subscription pricing. Software did it first. Then media. Then food delivery. Then physical products. Each new category of subscription business could look at the one before it and learn what worked.
When you see a behavior change succeeding in one industry, ask yourself: Which adjacent industry has the same structural conditions but hasn’t adopted this yet? That’s where the next wave of opportunity lives.
Your action: Pick a behavior change that’s established in one industry. List three adjacent industries where it hasn’t fully arrived. Research whether early signs of adoption exist there.
Indicator 3: Incumbents Are Dismissing It
This might be the most reliable indicator I know. When established players actively dismiss something — calling it a toy, a gimmick, or something “their customers would never want” — it’s often because they can feel the threat but can’t bring themselves to adapt.
Blockbuster dismissed streaming. Taxi companies dismissed ride-sharing apps. Traditional publishers dismissed self-publishing. In every case, the dismissal was followed by a rapid shift that the incumbents couldn’t recover from.
I saw this in the magic product world too. Established magic dealers dismissed direct-to-consumer digital sales as “low quality” and “not the real magic market.” Within three years, the “not real market” was where most of the money was flowing.
If you’re building something and the established players are dismissing it, that’s not discouraging. It’s encouraging. It means you have a window before they take it seriously, and by the time they do, you’ll have a head start.
Indicator 4: The Cost of Entry Is Dropping
When something becomes dramatically cheaper or easier to do, adoption accelerates. This is almost a law of business physics.
The cost of starting an e-commerce store dropped from tens of thousands of dollars to nearly zero over a decade. The number of e-commerce businesses exploded. The cost of producing video content dropped from professional-grade equipment to a smartphone. The volume of video content exploded.
Right now, the cost of building software is dropping rapidly because of AI and no-code tools. That means more people will build software products. That means more competition, yes, but also more demand for everything that supports software creators — education, templates, infrastructure, community.
When you see the cost of entry dropping in a category, ask two questions: What new entrants will this create? And what will those new entrants need that doesn’t exist yet?
The answers point toward the businesses you should consider building.
Indicator 5: You’re Seeing It in Job Postings
Job postings are a lagging indicator of what companies are already doing, but a leading indicator of what they’re about to do at scale.
When a new skill or tool starts appearing in job descriptions — especially in companies outside its original industry — that’s a signal of mainstream adoption approaching. The company has already decided this matters; the job posting is the implementation phase.
Track job postings in your area of interest. When you see a new term or tool appearing with increasing frequency across different companies and industries, the trend behind it has already passed the experimental phase and is entering the institutional phase.
Your action: Search job boards for terms related to your area of interest. Filter by the last 30, 60, and 90 days. If the volume is increasing, you’re watching a trend accelerate.
How to Position Yourself Early
Spotting a trend is only valuable if you act on it before it becomes obvious. Here are four positioning strategies:
1. Build expertise early. If you spot a trend that aligns with your skills and unfair advantages, become one of the first people who deeply understands it. Write about it. Build with it. Teach it. Early expertise compounds over time.
2. Solve the first-wave problems. Every trend creates problems for its early adopters. These problems are often unglamorous — documentation is bad, tooling is immature, best practices don’t exist. Solving those problems positions you as essential infrastructure for the trend.
3. Build bridges between the trend and existing behavior. Most people don’t want revolutionary change. They want evolution. If you can show how a new trend connects to something they already do and makes it better, you reduce adoption friction dramatically.
4. Start where the trend is, not where it’s going. Don’t build for the world five years from now. Build for the early adopters who exist today. Serve them well, learn from them, and let the market pull you forward.
The velocity principle applies here: being early and imperfect beats being late and polished. If you wait for the trend to be obvious before you start, you’ve lost the positioning advantage.
The Counter-Signal: When to Ignore a “Trend”
Not every signal is real. Here are the counter-indicators that suggest something is hype rather than trend:
- All talk, no behavior change. Lots of articles and conference talks, but actual usage isn’t growing.
- Driven by a single company’s marketing budget. If one big player is pushing something hard but organic adoption isn’t following, it’s a campaign, not a trend.
- No clear problem being solved. If the primary benefit is “it’s new” or “it’s cool,” wait for the utility to emerge.
- Early adopters are abandoning it. When the people who tried it first are moving on, the staying power isn’t there.
Being early is an advantage. Being early to the wrong thing is a waste of time. The indicators above help you distinguish between the two.
Takeaways
- Separate trends from fads. Trends change behavior; fads capture attention. Watch for utility-driven adoption, not novelty-driven buzz.
- Watch what builders build. When early adopters invest time creating tools and extensions on top of something, mainstream adoption usually follows.
- Track behavior change across industries. What succeeds in one industry often spreads to adjacent ones. Position yourself in the next wave.
- Listen to what incumbents dismiss. Their denial is often your window of opportunity.
- Act before it’s obvious. Build expertise, solve first-wave problems, and start with today’s early adopters. Being early and imperfect beats being late and polished.
