In Search of Search Trends in 2022

Selecting a problem to solve can be challenging - how do you know you're committing and going all-in on an idea that's a winner?

While there are many indicators on the success of a project or venture (e.g. relationship of team mates, in startup-world a Cost of Customer Acquisition (CAC) as close to zero as possible, etc.), one of the most common ideas is to play in a market that's a rising tide.

Great founder, poor market - market wins. Poor founder, great market, market wins.

As a result, it's important to observe where there could be rising tides - to put this into numbers, somewhere with a Cumulative Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) or more than 20% (recommended as a criteria for investment in Y Combinator Venture Capital circles).

While by no means perfect, an indicator of these rising tides, used often by marketers, is the humble Google Search. The action potential of actually triggering a search for a topic, more often than not, is by some way an indicator of interest - as such, we can use handy resources such as the Google Trends to get an understanding of change in Search volume, and therefore change in interest, over time.

In this article, we'll look to explore a few interesting trends picked up circa. third quarter 2022 (July - September). To note: the objective here is to seek out a phrase with over 20% CAGR in Search volume, and to bear in mind that this is by no means an absolutely perfect way of measuring demand.

Let's begin.

Social Media

• Tiktoker: 2 -> 75 in 4 years. 147% CAGR
• Discord: 3 -> 99 in 6 years, huge spike since COVID, and maxed out Jan 2022. CAGR of 114%
• Reddit: 38 -> 100 in 6 years, steady growth, 44% CAGR.
  
  

Digital Marketplaces

• Appsumo: 18 -> 92 in 6 years. 31% CAGR
• Fiverr: 13 -> 100 in 9 years, near-constant growth rate. 25% CAGR, led by Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka

General Topics

• Entrepreneurship: 50 -> 100 between 2016 and 2020. That is 18.9% CAGR
• Decentralised Finance: 3 -> 66 between 2020 and 2022. That is 459% CAGR (but expected to slow with recession)
• White-label product: 54 -> 100 in 6 years. 11% CAGR, led by the UK, then Australia
• Print on Demand: 17 -> 100 in 6 years. 34% CAGR.
• Freelancing: 30 -> 100 in 6 years, increasing growth rate, even in current climate. 22% CAGR over 6 years, >33% CAGR over past year
• Fashion Influencer: 5 -> 86 in 6 years: 108% CAGR
• Fitness Influencer: 1 -> 46 in 5 years: 114% CAGR
• Finance Influencer: 5 -> 55 in 6 years: 92% CAGR
• Finfluencer: 3 -> 45 in 1 year (4200% CAGR)
• Dropshipping: 10 -> 92 in 6 years (108% CAGR)

Cultural Trends

• Career switch - experiencing a downwards search trend at the moment

Conclusion

We've reviewed a number of topics that meet our criteria of achieving more than 20% CAGR and signals a growth in interest in specific topic areas. With relation to Depyct, we're seeing very interesting upticks in dropshipping, print on demand and various types of influencers. Less so on Stock Photos and Logos, which may be an indicator of where to focus conversations with customers.

In terms of distribution, there are impressive increases on the Social Media platforms Reddit, Discord and Tiktok; novel approaches to marketing here could yield excellent returns on investment, given their lack of maturity (and also competition for advertising services) compared to more established household names like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Additionally, the alternative marketplaces Fiverr and Appsumo, are growing - it could be interesting to use these avenues as a source of distribution too (being mindful of where the concentration of that traffic comes from).

Next steps in this exercise would be to go broader on the search and much more precise on the analysis and comparison - a tool such as the Google Trends API under the guidance of this document would be a novel next step to explore.

How do you think the future of interest in your company's associated topics will evolve over time?