How to use anti-trends to get ahead of 99% of creators
Plus my best ChatGPT prompt yet... eeek**
Happy Tuesday 👋,
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Last week I wrote about Mark Rober’s smash hit Build Box.
There are 101 reasons for his success.
But one I want to talk about today is anti-trends.
Something I’ve never seen anybody else talk about. In the next 2 minutes, I’ll tell you all about it, and give you a ChatGPT prompt so you can use it yourself.
Let’s get into it 👇
Step 1: Understand why Build Box works
If you didn’t read last week’s email, Mark Rober launched CrunchLabs and Build Box in 2022. It’s been a smash hit —they’ve delivered ‘millions of boxes’ which roughly equates to some serious cash.
Rober is earning upwards of $3 million a month from CrunchLabs alone.
Now I believe CrunchLab works for three main reasons:
He’s got buckets of credibility —Mark Rober has a huge (and loyal) following on YouTube and he does cool stuff (he’s an ex-NASA engineer).
He’s made learning, cool & fun — Most parents are begging their kids to sit and do something productive with their time, but most kids don’t want to. Rober blends fun and learning together, something parents LOVE.
He’s positioned an analog toy in a digital age — This is a toy you build with your hands. You’re not in front of a screen. Not soaking up social media. You’re reading instructions and building stuff.
The last point is the thing I want to talk about… so let’s talk about anti-trends.
Step 2: Figure out what’s trending & the ‘anti-trend’
To figure out how you can do it, we first need to consider what things are going up (and have been going up in the last 5-10 years).
Booming industries:
Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning — AI-powered tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, etc have become the go-to tools for productivity (and everything else)
Subscription-Based Services —Streaming platforms (Netflix, Disney+, Spotify) and SaaS products have exploded.
Online Shopping & E-Commerce —Amazon, Shopify, and other platforms have made online shopping the norm.
Cryptocurrency & Digital Assets — Crypto adoption has surged, with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and NFTs becoming mainstream topics.
Remote Work & Digital Collaboration Tools — The pandemic accelerated the shift to remote work (think tools like Zoom, Slack, Notion, and Asana).
But we’re not listing these to figure out how we can benefit from them. We are *actually* reverse-engineering them to uncover the anti-trend.
In other words, what does that trend cause?
For example:
📈 Increase of digital—Social media, online e-commerce, and online experiences have all shot up in the last 10 years.
📉 Decrease in experiencing the real world—Fewer people are paying attention to in-person events and things you make with your hands.
Step 3: Identify the competing desire
Next is to ask yourself, what’s wrong with that?
So the world is increasing its digital use which means a decrease in the real world, what concerns do you have about that…
Here’s some:
Lack of human interaction
Online bullying and harassment
Inability to develop personal skills
Lack of empathy because everyone’s behind a screen
I could go on. Different groups of people have different concerns, so you want to summarise for a certain group of people, aka your target market.
For parents:
🤼 Competing desire — Parents want children to experience more of the real world, they are too stuck in the online world.
Step 4: Position your product
Once you have all this information your next step is to position your product that satisfies that competing desire. In other words, here, how can you meet the needs of a worried parent, who wants their child to spend more time in the real-world?
🍯 Product opportunity — Build Box.
The framework
1️⃣ Identify the Trend – What’s currently booming?
2️⃣ Find the Anti-Trend – What does this trend unintentionally reduce or replace?
3️⃣ Determine the Competing Desire – What concerns or frustrations arise from this shift? What do people secretly want instead?
4️⃣ Position Your Product – How can your product fulfill that competing desire?
Here’s a worked example:
Trend: Remote work
Product opportunity: Analog Office – A premium subscription for home office essentials
Pro-tip: use the ChatGPT prompt below (insert your trend and it’ll spit out 5 product ideas)
🧙♂️ Words of wisdom
Remember, what goes up impacts all other aspects of life. We live in an ecosystem of things. Trends do not happen in isolation. They have ripple effects across all other areas of life.
Pay attention to what’s happening in the world and you’ll spot the next big product opportunity.