Hey everyone, Josh here, one of the creators of this report.

I posted a while back about how I built and sold my show HN trend-spotting tool, Exploding Topics, in 6 months. Since it was an acqui-hire, I’ve still been working on the tool and improving how it works.

(Partly thanks to the great feedback you guys gave me!)

And I spent all last week using it to figure out what the long-term impacts of COVID-19 might be.

Specifically what new business opportunities have been accelerated by the virus… and are outlasting the lockdowns.

There are some pretty surprising ones. Check it out and let me know what you think.

This is nice! I like the graphs and the general feeling, and the utility is important as well. One minor UX tweak: remove the tile description text ellipsis and nowrap and just let it flow and wrap. Makes browsing the main page much better, otherwise I have to navigate into each tile and then back just to understand what it is about.

The site is really interesting!

I agree with this comment. I wish I could see the full desc on each card on the homepage, and most descriptions are only a few lines anyways. I was also having an issue with the x button. It wouldn’t respond and then I’d tap again eventually causing it to open the card behind it.

Fantastic Marie! The website is very sleek + nice, and the community itself looks awesome.

Hi everyone, I used the YC top companies list for 2019 as a source for the company names to use (https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/).

Then I’ve ranked them by Google search volume growth over the last 10 years (ie. the gradient in the charts).

I did have to exclude some companies from the source list if they have names similar to common everyday keywords. This is because it’s hard to attribute specific search numbers to the company or the other meaning, like for example “Front”.

Any other questions about the data or anything just let me know!

Ahh - thank you!

Thanks for flagging this up!

This is exactly it. Thanks for laying it out so clearly :)

Ahaha... I didn't know how to explain that better...

We both waved our hands up and down in the air like a handshake but we only had video... is there a name for that?! :D

Demolition Man handshake

I'd say you "virtually shook hands over Skype!"

Right now that's because of my founder bias, but we're looking to include more and more types of topics across health, business, marketing, fashion and so on.

Congrats on the sale! Came here with the same comment. My wife has an online store for clothing/fashion and does it now manually to detect trends, think: "megan markle jacket". This tool would be super useful and save a lot of time.

Btw. is the possibility of adding new topics currently down? Nothing seem to happen when clicking "Add a topic".

Hahaha - thank you! I did want to have the story on paper for myself to look back on, but some traffic is a nice bonus :)

Hi there, the graphs do actually match up - it's just the Google Trends default time period is usually different to ours. Plus the width and height of their charts make the chart gradients look flatter than ours :)