Community highlights: Trendsters solve Zoom headaches and help local businesses

Inside our private Facebook group, Trends members swap ideas and advice. Here are some of their success stories.

The Trends Facebook group is both incredible and incredibly active.

Community highlights: Trendsters solve Zoom headaches and help local businesses

Over the past month, the group has contributed 700 posts, 7.9k comments and 12.4k reactions.

Trends members network, swap advice, vet ideas, incubate new ventures, and do deals. Here are some great Trends community stories from the past year:

Chris Koerner read one of our reports about the anything-as-a-service (XaaS) industry and was inspired to start an ecommerce-as-a-service (EaaS) business. He bought the domain name www.SendEats.com for less than $10, and he’s now helping brick and mortar food shops sell online.

Trendsters Ali Jiwani and Anson Cao (along with a 3rd founder, Amy Liu) had an awful 20-person Zoom call at the start of quarantine and decided to do something about it.

They built Rally, an online video conferencing platform meant to make collaboration easier (one feature: conversation switching between groups). They’ve hosted more than 100 events (including one for the Trends group) and have secured investment from a prominent Silicon Valley VC.

After reading a Trends article on the fast-growing world of online plant sales, Narek Vardanian and his team built a Kickstarter campaign and raised $1.5m for PICO, an innovative indoor gardening system.

Paul Lemley told the group that he used no-code tools to quickly create a directory app to help local businesses in specific cities. He laid out step-by-step instructions, and fellow Trendsters replicated the app for 17 other cities.

On the My First Million podcast, Sam often mentions his love of job boards and wanted to create one based on companies he would vet personally. Trendster Henry Johnson loved the idea so much that he did it, curating fast-growing business ideas under the Rocketship Jobs brand.

Tamar Weinberg was ready to launch a unisex fragrance before the pandemic hit. She lives in New Rochelle, New York, the first suburb in the US that had community spread of the coronavirus. She ended up getting COVID-19. After recovering, she recently let the Facebook group know she was launching a crowdfunding campaign for her fragrance.

Our members tell us all the time that the community alone is worth the price of admission. Don’t forget: For today only, you can get $100 off your first year of Trends.

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