Supertrends: We Made What I Needed For Myself

I've always been fascinated by the rapid pace of innovation and its impact on business and society. Throughout my career, I've relied heavily on financial information to make decisions, using services like Bloomberg to stay informed. But I realized there lacked a service that focused on scientific and technological advancements and how they would impact us.

With my background in both engineering and economics, I could see the immense value that such a tool would bring to businesses, researchers, and decision-makers across industries. And that’s how the idea of Supertrends was born.

Building Supertrends: A Labor of Love

When I first embarked on this journey in 2019, I was optimistic thinking we could get the platform up and running within two years, but this proved to be a little ambitious. It ended up taking five years of intense work to bring my vision to life. By the way, I think overoptimism is a typical character trait of entrepreneurs. We don’t make things because they are easy. We do it because we erroneously assume they will be easy.

Anyway, our first focus was to build a comprehensive timeline of human innovation, spanning an incredible 3.3 million years and including 16,000 key innovations. But we didn't stop there. We wanted Supertrends to be forward-looking, so we incorporated 4,000 predictions about future innovations.

The process was complex and multifaceted, using 75,000 AI prompts and queries to generate our initial database, but that was just the beginning. To ensure accuracy and credibility, we assembled a panel of 160 experts to help us verify the information that AI extracts. These experts span many industries and help us adjust insights which ensures that our content is of high quality and accurate.

With the Supertrends platform forming our foundation, we were able to launch our most recent product that is a game-changer for business leaders and decision-makers: Smart Scans. These are highly customized, AI-powered information searches that provide businesses with tailored insights based on their specific business needs. We work closely with the businesses to understand their business goals and the information they need to then build a tailored platform that extracts the exact information they're looking for. Smart Scans essentially eliminate desktop research, allowing businesses to focus on critical decision making.

The Supertrends Solution: More Than Just a Database

Supertrends is now a living, breathing system that's constantly evolving. Every day, our algorithms scan about 5,000 leading science and technology media sources in 30 languages, searching for 3,000 specific keywords. That’s 15 million data checks daily. We use natural language processing to summarize these findings into unique feature stories, which are then integrated into our system.

The Supertrends machine currently combines 14 AI systems and around 300 standard prompts embedded in our software. It’s like a Swiss watch with a ton of things going on non-stop behind the surface. However, for the user, its simple. You can monitor your markets in a real -time dashboards.

Or, you can request an instant, tailormade podcast at any meaningful length, made just for you.

You can also get complete, structured and illustrated market reports on any technology or market that interests you right now, including completely up-to-data information about definitions, market sizes, startup companies, experts, recent news, and future breakthrough predictions. Such a report could take a consulting company weeks to make, but we do it in less than a minute.

Building Supertrends hasn't been without its challenges. The sheer scale of what we were trying to achieve was daunting at times. Integrating AI capabilities with human expertise required careful balancing and constant refinement.

Concerning the market, we now know where to focus. First, it turns out to be very easy to sell as integrated information systems to large multinational companies. And second, we discovered a huge interest in the education sector. Basically, they often want to create what I call the inverted classroom where learning is AI-driven and social activities on campus is focused on case work. However, you can also automate both, and we know how.

Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs

I have authored 17 books, and one of them is called “Entrepreneur”. Here, I and my co-author list five traps for entrepreneurs:
● Poor product/market fit
● Internal disputes
● Premature scaling
● Unbalanced scaling
● Misguided transition from early adopters to mainstream

I have tried them all, but my personal weakness is a tendency to make premature scaling. The cure is to repeat to myself that in any startup, we must nail it before we scale it.

At Supertrends, a part of nailing it is to be really smart about the way we leverage AI. We are now estimating that to do what we do without AI, would require around 500 full-time workers on the payroll.

Creating Supertrends has been a challenging, but incredibly rewarding journey. As we move further into an era defined by rapid technological advancement, I believe tools like Supertrends will become increasingly crucial for businesses and researchers alike. We're not just mapping the future of innovation – we're helping to shape it. And that, to me, is the most exciting part of all.