Use the *emotion-tech* boom to innovate your next product
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This morning I stumbled across something strange.
I was researching the fastest-growing startups in 2025, and as I scrolled through AI this and AI that, I came across something I’d never seen before.
A company called CradleWise.
Their strapline: Meet the world’s smartest convertible bassinet and crib.
A shoutout from Sam Altman, 9,500% growth in 5 years, $8 million in revenue in 2023.
They’ve created a business that helps families around the world, and there’s a lesson in their market selection for all of us.
High-emotion market + technology
Most builders think the best product wins.
But in *actual* fact, the market matters. It matters A LOT. You can have the best product in a low-emotion market, and you’ll find yourself exhausted trying to sell.
What you really want is a high-emotion market, and to pair that with tech.
I call this the *emotion-tech* boom.
Your first job is to find your market, and the second is to apply tech to solve a daily (high-emotion, high-frequency) problem.
Let’s get into it.
Step 1: Identify the *high-emotion* market
Here’s a weird shift:
Instead of asking what product should I create, ask yourself, what areas (or sometimes it’s easier to think of processes) in life are full of emotion…
Examples:
Pet care
Parenting
Job changes
Moving homes
End-of-life care
Marriage/divorce
Fertility treatment
Each of these is an example of a process that involves a lot of emotion. For example, caring for your pet is full of emotion.
Emotional highs: getting it right and feeling good about being a dog mum.
Emotional lows: getting it wrong, them getting poorly, and feeling like a bad human.
If you’re a dog parent or know a dog parent, you’ll know that more than ever, dog parents are spending more money and time on their dogs. That’s evident through posts on social, through average spend on pets going up, and there are a whole host of factors that tell you that an area is *high-emotion*.
It’s useful to validate your topic as *high-emotion* before you invest time into it.
Step 2: Validate signals with this GPT
You’ll want to check that the signals for your topic align with what would be considered high-emotion topics or processes.
Here’s a GPT I’ve generated to help you do that:
Emotion-tech prompt
Evaluate the topic: [YOUR TOPIC]
Score it out of 10 based on how well it fits the Emotech category.
Consider these factors:
1. Emotional Intensity – Does the topic involve heightened emotions like fear, love, grief, joy, guilt, or anxiety?
2. Social Signals – Are people sharing raw personal stories, seeking community, or publicly asking for help?
3. DIY Coping – Are people hacking their own systems or routines due to lack of good tools?
4. Spending Behavior – Are users willing to pay for peace of mind, convenience, or emotional relief?
5. Repeat Engagement – Is this a space where people return frequently or develop habits (subscriptions, tracking, monitoring)?
6. Desperation Moments – Do people Google or purchase things in a panic or peak emotion moment?
7. Life Transition Tie-In – Does it relate to moments of change (birth, death, divorce, job loss, etc.)?
8. Underserved Needs – Are existing tools clunky, impersonal, or dismissive of the emotional weight?
9. Public Gratitude for Products – Are people praising tools/services as life-savers in this space?
10. Language of Vulnerability – Do users express themselves with words like “alone,” “overwhelmed,” “finally,” “hope,” “enough,” etc.?
Then give me a short paragraph explaining why you gave that score. You should end up with something that looks like this:
Step 3: Apply tech to their *daily* life
The next part of the equation is to apply technology to a small part of your target customer’s daily life. It doesn’t have to be ground-breaking, it doesn’t have to be a huge issue.
Really, it needs to be a high emotional problem that happens a lot, and by solving it, you create a better life for them.
In the case of Cradlewise:
Rocks the baby to sleep without human intervention
Tracks sleep monitoring
Breath monitor
Sound machine
AKA: It helps your baby get to (and stay asleep) for longer whilst giving the parents peace of mind that everything is okay.
Benefit:
Frees up time (I don’t have to keep rocking the baby) - logical benefit
Reassurance (I feel like a good parent) - emotional benefit
Sleep is a small part (or maybe a large part) of the parent’s daily life, but it happens every day and is a source of pain and frustration. Cradlewise solves for that.
It’s your job to figure out what part of the ‘daily’ struggle you want to solve for.
Step 5: Apply this GPT to find your problem to solve
If you’re struggling to pinpoint it, use this GPT: