
Show HN: We track Reddit, Google trends, Twitter, etc. to find trending topics - framschwartz
https://meetglimpse.com
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framschwartz
Hey everyone, founder here. A few friends and I built Glimpse to surface
trending topics - companies, products, industries, everything - and we send
out curated trend reports via email.

The way it works is we first capture nearly every topic online, then we look
at frequency of discussion, searches, shares, etc. around each topic. Beyond
just the growth in frequency, our software looks for indicators that a trend
is organic and has more room to grow, as it’s important that we surface trends
not fads.

There are plenty of tools that help you dive deep on a new trend you’ve heard
of, but the problem is you need to have already heard about the trend. This is
what we’re solving for - exposure to the unknown unknowns.

As an example, SheIn is growing on Google Trends, but when you compare that to
popularity on other sites like Reddit and Twitter, you realize that the large
majority of search traffic is driven by people googling after they see an ad.

Surprisingly, nearly all our engineering energy goes into filtering out the
noise. Even after this, there’s a good deal of manual work. We’ve found that
most of our users don’t want to do this themselves through a tool - they want
the insights packaged and delivered, and we think it’s important to provide
high quality trends that aren’t biased by data.

While Glimpse started as a way for us to figure out which products we could
build and sell online, we realized how helpful it is for founders, investors,
product people and marketers to constantly see how consumer behavior,
marketing, and products are evolving so they can better do their jobs.

Would love feedback!

~~~
lettergram
Congratulations!

We built a similar product:

[https://projectpiglet.com/](https://projectpiglet.com/)

Except it appears we do filtering very differently. Our system also suggests
points to enter and leave a given asset based on the information.

It’s a pretty hard and crowded space. Feel free to look at some of my repos
and blog posts, might shed some light on how to improve your system. Although
your UI/UX is far superior

~~~
SirLJ
Where is your track record?

~~~
lettergram
[https://austingwalters.com/backtesting-our-100-yoy-profit-
ge...](https://austingwalters.com/backtesting-our-100-yoy-profit-generating-
strategy/)

~~~
SirLJ
Sorry, but this is not a track record...

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chx
NowPublic did a tool like that in 2008 intended for the use of newsrooms but
we never got a single subscriber, every newsroom we showed immediately wanted
to acquire the company :D Eventually one did. It was a relatively primitive
affair extracting information from the Twitter gardenhose with Stanford NLP
and storing / retrieving with Xapian. There was nothing like that at the time
as far as I am aware.

~~~
framschwartz
Very cool! And yes, all the data is out there and is public, it's just a
problem of filtering through the noise to get the signal. Because < 0.01% of
topics discussed online are sustainable trends, it can take a bit of
engineering work to do this all...

1\. at a non exorbitant cost 2\. in a time period where it takes less time
than the cycle of information otherwise it's useless by the time the trend is
surfaced.

~~~
chx
Yeah, as I said, this was primitive: Stanford NLP was used to extract keywords
out of tweets and then it was down to measure the velocity of keywords.

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ken
More analytics. I feel like these are an admission that you are unable to
judge quality in any meaningful way, so you're just going to go with what's
popular today.

If I look around the products I own, and especially the ones I enjoy and find
useful, I don't see very many which could have been arrived at by the wisdom
of the crowds. You're not going to create a car that way, or a bicycle, or an
iPhone. That's just not how products are created.

What exactly does one do with the knowledge that "Axe throwing" and "Gut
health" searches are way up this year? "Stay in touch with the world beyond
your bubble" sounds rather vague, and the sort of thing I could get by going
on Twitter once a week.

~~~
framschwartz
Hey Ken - thanks for stopping by!

I think the products that have step function level effects on society are the
sum of many smaller trends.

We've found that these trends, however small or large, tend to highlight the
bigger picture around how the consumer world is evolving.

Like you point out, axe throwing is not very interesting on its own. But when
you take a closer look, axe throwing, escape rooms, etc. are rising to fill
the need of real life social experiences that can't be easily replaced by
companies like Netflix as the more digitally replicable social experiences
like movie theaters decline in popularity.

Our customers - founders, investors, product people, marketers, etc. - tell us
that this deeper understanding of how and why the world is changing is useful
to them.

And separately, while there are indeed a small number of products that have a
disproportionately large impact on society (like the ones you mentioned: car,
bike, iPhone), our economy is also largely dependent on the inverse - a large
number of products that individually have a small impact on society - many of
these are products we use and consume day to day like toiletries.

The growth of products in these potentially less impactful categories can
still sometimes highlight a meaningful shift in society and we at Glimpse
think it's worth talking about.

Hope I answered your questions!

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cparsons3000
Is this the same as this from 19 days ago? "Show HN: I built a service to
discover rapidly growing Google search topics"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20478339](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20478339)

~~~
jhow15
Hey there, that was [https://trennd.co/](https://trennd.co/) which I recently
built and launched on Show HN.

We're tackling the same problem just in different ways!

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magthor
I just signed up for the $29/mo plan. I appreciate that I immediately received
the June and July newsletters. In the July one, there is a good idea that is
very relevant to my wife's business (she owns a chain of hair salons). Thanks
for making this, it's really cool!

~~~
framschwartz
So awesome that it's been helpful! Always glad to hear. Feel free to hit me up
if there are any other ways we can be helpful! noah@meetglimpse.com

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jhow15
Hey Noah, great work with Glimpse!

Josh here from [https://trennd.co/](https://trennd.co/) which I recently built
and launched on Show HN too. We're tackling the same problem of surfacing new
trends, just in different ways!

Interested to hear more about how you validate trends and reduce noise. I'm
inclined to agree that this is the biggest challenge. I'm guessing it's a lot
of manual verification on your end?

~~~
framschwartz
Hey Josh!

Yes, fun stuff to be working on!

We use a number of strategies to cut through the noise. One of strategies
that's easiest to articulate is comparing a topic's trend lines on different
channels to identify organic growth vs. inorganic growth. This is because we
think it’s important to provide high quality trends that aren’t biased by data
from one channel.

We're also more inclined to share trends that we think have room to grow, as
one of our internal metrics is the growth multiple of all trends we cover.

~~~
jhow15
Yeah that makes a lot of sense to compare trend lines across channels - thanks
for sharing!

~~~
qatanah
Hey Josh! Loved the website and your work! ;)

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alexbanks
479/mo. You'd better be confident in your data.

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myth_drannon
How are the industry names classified? Isn't just easier to use NAICS? I
imagine enterprise customers are used to that.

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gmays
Interesting. This is similar to Show HN for Trennd just a few weeks ago with a
very similar premise:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20478339](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20478339)

Same team?

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philip1209
I love Glimpse! I look forward to the emails ever month, and it always leads
me down a rabbit hole of cool new stuff.

Can you explain more about how you mix automated tech and manual editorial
work? How automated is the process of publishing a newsletter?

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dudeedud
Hello to all! We have been doing this service for quite some time:
[https://signum.ai/](https://signum.ai/)

We use AI to search for emerging trends and predict their changes.

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wslh
But this gives the information every month instead of when the growth is
happening?

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framschwartz
Exceedingly few trends - whether companies, products, industries, etc. become
popular overnight.

Truly sustainable trends have healthy growth curves, rarely propped up by huge
spikes often caused by PR or unsustainable growth stunts.

If we showed you everything that was happening the day or even week it started
to be talked about or searched more than 100 times per day, you'd see a ton of
noise, 99% of which would be useless long term.

~~~
wslh
I understand that this is true in general but you can add intelligence to the
process and filter the noise (even with errors). For example, if there is a
disease that is propagating (e.g. flu) you can understand that this trend
means something different than a music show trend that sparks around a
specufic event.

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without_words
Interesting. Thanks for sharing.

