Ride existing waves of demand rather than creating new categories

Disrupting an existing category is far easier than creating a new one - customers already understand the problem

Reposition to higher-LTV customer segments when you discover unexpected demand patterns

Compete in existing markets rather than trying to create new categories

Monitored X/Twitter trends daily, identified emerging needs (Excel formulas, AI summarizers), and launched products aligned with trending topics

Used Google Trends to confirm 'stop sugar' keywords trending upward over 5 years, verified on TikTok/Instagram that French women influencers were creating sugar-quitting content, proving organic audience interest before building

Built for ChatGPT platform which already had massive demand and hundreds of millions of users, rather than creating a new category or standalone product

Entered market immediately after ChatGPT launch in 2022 when AI content detection tools were emerging, positioning for the counter-wave of evasion demand

Identified online education as inevitable trend and built platform before market was ready. When Covid forced schools and corporations online in 2020, demand exploded.

Identified strong existing demand for founder case studies by consuming Indie Hackers content. Positioned Starter Story to serve the underserved non-technical founder audience that IH did not focus on

While consulting for SaaS founders, noticed recurring DMs asking about his LinkedIn growth tactics rather than SaaS sales. Recognized this unsolicited demand signal as a bigger market opportunity than his planned consulting business

Identified that major 2016-2017 security breaches were creating a secular wave where enterprise buyers would require SOC 2 from startup vendors, even though almost no startups had SOC 2 at the time

Invested heavily in feature animation when Disney's animation department was considered a dying division, betting that quality storytelling could revive audience demand for animated films

Built AI text-to-video tool at the intersection of the AI wave and the short-form video content explosion on TikTok/YouTube Shorts

Rode the COVID remote work wave that dramatically increased demand for efficient web development and deployment tools. Was already positioned as the simplification platform when demand surged

Rode the existing wave of social media growth that created millions of people who needed design tools but could not use Adobe. Did not try to create a new category - addressed the obvious growing demand from the social media explosion.

Entered the quit-vaping space when vaping was trending rapidly among college students and anti-vaping content was going viral on TikTok, riding an existing wave of demand

Timed product launch to ride the AI coding tool explosion of late 2024, building for the growing wave of developers using Cursor, Bolt, Claude Code

Founded in 2019 riding the quantified-self and biohacking wave - consumers were already tracking sleep (Oura), heart rate (Whoop), and steps (Fitbit). Glucose was the obvious next biometric, and CGM hardware already existed for diabetics but not wellness consumers

Built Elephas immediately when GPT-3 launched, recognizing that AI writing assistance was an emerging wave. Created a simple wrapper to make GPT-3 accessible through Mac apps before competitors.

Pivoted to GPT-3 integration shortly after its launch by emailing OpenAI's CTO directly for early access. Rode the AI/GPT-3 wave in copywriting before larger competitors entered.

Launched FinChat in April 2023 by combining existing financial data aggregation (3 years of work) with the LLM wave. Positioned as 'ChatGPT for finance' at peak AI interest.

Rode the wave of YouTube's success by creating a live streaming alternative when video consumption was exploding online