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Hello again and thanks for reading. Trends curation and commentary seems to be popular based on initial feedback I’ve received!

I’m going to aim for a more regular cadence with these “trends” reports, with an emphasis on highlighting only the most interesting or thematic trends I’m seeing in martech.

Ok, excited for the ones I found this week. Let’s jump in.

But first, a word from our sponsor of this week’s edition…

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Audio to Text Generation (with AI!)

I’ve been looking for some good ways to turn video and podcast content into repurposed summaries and blog posts.

I stumbled on Castmagic and I’ve been having fun playing around with it, BUT there’s a much larger ecosystem of tools out there. It’s blowing up fast.

This has been a fairly durable mover of the last few years:

SO what are some of the tools and names to watch in this space?

• Castmagic

• Notta

• Otter

Micro SaaS

The “micro” SaaS trend of the last year seems correlated to the rise of AI “low code” and “no code” capabilities.

It’s easier than ever for a non-technical founder to get an MVP live.

What exactly IS micro SaaS?

In other words, how do you solve the problem with the LEAST amount of resources?

I personally love following the Micro SaaS Idea newsletter, even if I’m not actively launching a technical product. It provides a great lens to see what’s happening at the “front edge” of MarTech.

Other good places to search for micro SaaS inspiration are: Product Hunt, ProductIdeas, and RequestForProduct.

Some interesting examples of micro SaaS are:

• Carrd

• Anytrack

• Plausible

• Punkt

• Invoicy

Temu Apocalypse

In case you missed it, Temu is absolutely RIPPING it, as a new ecommerce juggernaut.

The best way I can describe it is a cross between Amazon, Alibaba, and Shein…

The prices are rock bottom, often 30-40% lower than Amazon, but so far it’s unclear how consistent the product quality or customer service are.

I DO think this is a threat worth getting on your radar if you sell on Amazon and particularly if you source products from China.

What’s different about Temu (vs AliExpress, for example) is the FAST shipping times and ability to purchase single products.

While Amazon itself is facing this threat, I think the more existential threat is to the limited differentiated Amazon FBA seller, sourcing products from China…

That said, there have been others who’ve tried similar plays in the past (Wish, anyone?), so whether or not Temu can STAY in the US market for 12+ months will be key.

That’s it for this week, I’ll be back with in a couple weeks with some more deep dives.