4 trends for indie hackers in 2021: virtual team building, content repurposing + 2 more
Exploding Topics scours the internet to find emerging trends before they take off.
Here are four of the latest developments, along with some insights and analysis to help you take advantage.
1. Virtual Team Building
Searches for “virtual team building” are up 1,540% over the last year.
A Forbes report found that 45% of corporate teams state that they feel “less connected” to their peers since COVID. Partly due to a lack of formal and informal team building activities.
Which is why more and more companies are seeking out team building activities (like cooking classes, trivia, and awards) that can be done virtually.
Many companies are also bringing employees together via organized, Zoom-based lunches (Human Resource Director magazine reports that digital food vouchers sales are up 3x this year).
Thriver, one of the companies leading the way in the virtual team building space, raised a $33M Series B in August.
What’s next:
Virtual team building is part of the virtual office tool meta trend. 83% of companies plan on offering remote work options post-COVID. Which is leading to a growing number of SaaS products that aim to simulate the office environment online. Other examples of this trend include InStation, DingTalk, and Bluescape.
2. Content Repurposing
Content repurposing is reusing an existing piece of content (like a blog post) into a new format (like a YouTube video or podcast).
According to HubSpot, companies spend nearly half of their marketing budget on content creation.
And a recent industry survey found that the amount of time spent writing a single blog post has increased from 2½ hours in 2014 nearly 4 hours today (an increase of 63%).
Which is why more and more marketing departments are repurposing the content they create. In fact, Brafton reports that 60% of marketers reuse the content they create multiple times.
What’s next:
51% of professional marketers state that reusing content is “the most effective” content marketing strategy for their company. Which explains why we’re seeing a growing number of content repurposing tools enter the marketplace. Examples of emerging software in this space include Wavve, Designrr, and Visme.
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3. Cash App
Cash App is a mobile app created by Square that includes features for peer-to-peer payments and investing.
Cash App was responsible for approximately half of Square’s Q3 profits. And the app’s net income is growing at 212% (compared to 59% annual growth for Square as a whole).
It looks like the app has more room for growth: Cash App currently has 30 million monthly active users. This number is forecasted to rise to 66 million by 2023.
What’s next:
Cash App is part of the fast-growing P2P payment app industry. 30.6% of Americans have made a P2P payment over the last year. And it’s estimated that the P2P market will grow from $1.85B today to $4.49B by 2027. Other players in the P2P space include Chime Bank, Venmo, Zelle and Transferwise.
4. Vegan collagen
Searches for “vegan collagen” have increased by 97% since we first covered it back in June. So we thought we’d take another look at this exploding topic.
Vegan collagen is a collagen alternative that's derived from non-animal sources.
While “vegan collagen” is technically impossible, products are starting to crop up to meet skyrocketing demand for vegan-friendly collagen supplements.
Some contain micronutrients (like silica) that support healthy skin and nails.
Others use synthesized “plant collagen” that attempts to recreate the molecular structure of bovine collagen.
Growing brands in the vegan collage space include PowerGym, Naturelo, and Ojio.
What’s next:
Vegan collagen is part of the “Veganification” of everything meta trend. 7.3 million Americans consider themselves vegan or vegetarian. And they’re increasingly on the lookout for vegan products. Other examples of this trend include vegan meal kits, vegan jerky, vegan vitamins, pea milk, and vegan shrimp.
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Repurposing content is so great and I feel like more people should consider trying it out. One youtube video can also become a podcast, blog article, and shareable social media snippets. All with very little extra work.
💯% Corinn. Great content takes a ton of work to create - so it's worth squeezing as much juice out of it as possible when repurposing it is so much easier.
Have you tried converting a podcast to a blog before? I've been looking into this and its turned out to be a bit more challenging than I thought.
I think virtual team building will continue to become more prevalent as many of us now 'expect' to have flexibility in our work and be able to 'choose' remote work (if our role allows it!). The challenge I see is how to 'recreate' those in-person experiences/levels of engagement in a virtual setting.
This is a problem I have started to explore with my business: www.fild.co.uk. We still have a long way to go!
I wanted to ask where does Exploding Topics find trends from? Is it from google trends?
Hey Sagun, the chart data is based on Google trends global data. But we source new trends from across the web including social, shopping, and search.
I'm also interested to know this. I could not replicate their trends using Google trends at least.
+1. It's no coincidence our Growth Bites team has done three separate case studies on content repurposing:
👉 Absorb an old blog and repurpose its content to increase traffic
👉 Repackage old blog posts as interactive content to boost email sign-ups
👉 Embed your videos in blog articles to increase traffic
Great tactics. I gotta say, been loving the Growth Bites more generally too 👌
Really great insights!
Do you think virtual team building will fall down again as soon as "back to the office" is more possible?
The virtual team is here to stay. It was on an upward trend even before the pandemic. It just accelerated due to it. Even companies that are going back to office are keeping 30-50% staff at home. So the dramatic ramp up will be absent but more people will be working from home in the future.
Makes absolute sense, happy to hear that. Thanks for your opinion!
Having worked with a number of teams to create virtual experiences, I can say that the vast number of teams are adopting a hybrid model and still require virtual team building for community and cohesion.
I see the same development @marcastbury thanks for your perspective!
Love randomdots by the way I just added it to ViTAL
🤘 just checked out ViTAL, awesome collection of resources. Let's chat further, I'll send a you a DM.
Having built products for virtual team building, I wrote a summary based on my learnings over the past 6 months (+ some interesting insights from CTrip shifting to remote a while back).
https://randomdots.co/does-working-from-home-work/
The real challenge appears to be creating environments for creative work to flourish when working remote.
Love this @marcastbury
Thanks, Aakesh!