6 Trends Exploding Topics Found Super Early (+ How You Can Too)

At times, trend tracking can feel intangible. You know it’s important to stay on top of consumer patterns, but it’s difficult to visualize the direct effect it’s going to have on your business.

Understandably, you don’t want to make an investment in a trend-spotting tool like Exploding Topics until you’re sure that it really works.

It does.

Instead of abstract examples and hypotheticals, I thought it would be helpful to show you some of the times when Exploding Topics was majorly early to products, startups and trends that went on to be massive.

Your business or investment strategy could have received a huge edge over competitors if you had access to our data: faster product launches, first-mover SEO dominance, lower ad costs, and lower acquisition costs.

The trends below are just a tiny fraction of our success stories, and our trend spotting techniques are getting better all the time.

Snail Mucin

Snail mucin is the beauty industry’s name for snail slime. It has become vastly popular in cosmetics and skincare for its hydrating and anti-aging properties.

The so-called “snail beauty” market hit $887.74 million in 2025. But by now, the trend is mature: it would be incredibly hard for the average e-commerce business to compete in a saturated snail mucin market, and consumer interest is likely to keep trending downward.

But what if you could have found out about snail mucin in 2022, or even earlier? Even with the hype slowly dying down, the top sellers on Amazon today are still generating over $700,000 per month.

With Exploding Topics, you would have had the opportunity to get in early. It was in our database as early as 2020.

And we didn’t just leave you to find it for yourself. We mentioned it numerous times in curated trend reports in early 2021. This one is from March, but we also flagged the trend in January and February:

We still send reports like these to our subscribers every week. They are used to inform stocking decisions at top retailers like Target.

Finding Early Trends on Exploding Topics

You don’t have to rely on our newsletters for early trends (although our team does a great job of curating them).

Once you subscribe, you have full access to a powerful database. And we’ve made it super easy to search, so you can find the next snail mucin in your niche in just a few easy steps.

Let’s say you want to find a health and wellness trend. You just navigate to that category in the Trends Database. And if you would like to narrow it down further, you can select from 9 subcategories:

From there, you can get even more granular.

If you’re aggressively looking for early trends, you might want to tweak the criteria. You have multiple levers to pull: you can sort by newest “discovered date,” reduce the trends timeframe from 5 years all the way down to 3 months, and/or switch from stable to volatile trends.

Here’s what the nutrition sub-category looks like when searching for volatile, high-growth trends from the last 3 months (this search is from February 2026). It’s showing both brands and non-brands, but you could choose to switch between the two:

Meanwhile, if there’s a specific trend you want to validate, you can use the search feature. Even if it hasn’t been added to the database yet, you can use Trend Analysis to access the data you need.

There are loads more functions within Exploding Topics, and you can check out our blog for detailed guides to features like Trend Tracking and TikTok Insights. Or you can try them out for yourself with a free trial.

But now you know the basics of how the tool can surface trends, I’ll move on to some more success stories.

Pickleball

In 2026, you’ve definitely heard of pickleball. An estimated 50 million Americans have played the sport in the last 12 months.

And lots of those players are buying pickleball paddles, pickleball shoes, pickleball bags… the list goes on.

There’s still time to jump on some of these trends. Pickleball socks and pickleball grips both stand out as reasonably low-volume and high-growth.

But think about what you could have done if you knew about pickleball in 2020. Brands like TENVINA and JoncAye have only emerged in the last few years, but they’re each selling more than 1,000 paddles per month on Amazon.

When pickleball first entered our database, it was at around 10% of its current search volume. We flagged it to subscribers in a December 2020 newsletter, when there were an estimated 4.2 million players in the US:

Padel (1.5M monthly search volume) and wing foiling (246K monthly search volume) haven’t done too badly in the last 5+ years either!

Cozey

Cozey is a Canadian modular furniture startup.

I say startup, but I’ve known about it for almost 5 years. That’s all down to Exploding Topics.

We first mentioned Cozey in our newsletter in July 2021, about a month after a ~$1.5M private financing round and around a year after the company was founded.

At that time, search volume for Cozey was around 4.6K per month. Today, it’s 74K.

In the meantime, it’s raised another funding round worth around $11M. And in January last year, Axios reported that it expected to raise anywhere from $25M to $100M in debt and equity at its next round.

Revenue is in nine figures, with triple-digit annual growth.

Perplexity AI

Last September, AI giant Perplexity reportedly reached a $20B valuation.

When it first entered the Exploding Topics database, it hadn’t even raised a Series A round yet.

It would go on to do so in March 2023, raising $25.6M after hitting 2M monthly users in the space of 4 months.

Its timeline has been meteoric:

• August 2022: Founded
• September 2022: $3.1M seed round
• December 2022: Publicly launched its answer engine “Ask”
• December 2022: Discovered by Exploding Topics
• March 2023: 2 million monthly users, $25.6M Series A round
• January 2024, 10 million monthly users, $72.6M Series B round
• August 2025: Makes all-cash $34.5B offer for Google Chrome
• September 2025: Hits $20B valuation, reportedly lines up $200M in new funding
• December 2025: 116M total downloads on Google Play

Naturally, even after spotting the growth, only a select few would have been able to join these early funding rounds.

But even if you weren’t able to do that, being alerted to Perplexity so early on would have been a huge SEO opportunity. Content like reviews, feature comparisons, and walkthroughs was an open goal if you knew about the trend.

Today, Perplexity gets 17.1M monthly searches globally. Back in December 2022, that number was 21.4K (and just 4.4K in the US).

Air Fryer

70% of US homes either own an air fryer or intend to get one in the next year. It is increasingly ubiquitous in the American kitchen.

And there are now 3M+ more “air fryer” searches compared to when we first surfaced the trend in mid-2019 (before the pandemic sent searches spiraling).

Even back then, it was becoming a high-volume trend, and you might not have been able to start a ground-up kitchen electronics brand in time to beat the hype. But there were plenty of opportunities beyond just trying to sell air fryers:

• Related search terms: “air fryer recipes” now gets 165,000 searches per month. “Air fryer chicken wings,” “air fryer salmon,” and “air fryer baked potato” all get more than 60,000 per month.
• Accessories/companion products: air fryer cookbooks are a huge secondary market. But the #1 Amazon best-seller was first published in December 2019, months after Exploding Topics first surfaced the trend. You could also have been early on air fryer racks, cleaning brushes, and liners, all of which have extremely low barriers to entry.
• Affiliate content: “Best air fryers of 2019” would have been winning affiliate content, right in time for a holiday spike that took air fryer search volume above 1M for the first time. That playbook has been repeatable every year since.

The best part? Exploding Topics actually helps you find these secondary trends.

E-commerce trends get their own “product” page, where you can see average revenue, price, monthly sales, and Amazon best seller rank. But what you can also do is browse top sellers, related products, and related trends.

Looking at air fryers, the “related products” tab shows you that mini air fryers, digital air fryers, AI air fryers, and oven air fryers are all currently trending upward. As an inventory manager or manufacturer, this is invaluable information.

And the “related trends” tab flags up specific long-tail opportunities like “air fryer corn on the cob” and “air fryer dehydrator.”

So when you find the next big trend with Exploding Topics, you won’t just be working with a single insight. You’ll have a ready-made plan on how to dominate the entire ecosystem.

VEED

I’ve arguably saved the best until last with VEED. The video editing platform doesn’t get the same raw volumes as air fryers, Perplexity, or pickleball, but the multiplier compared to when Exploding Topics first discovered it is off the charts.

Here’s the standout: $1M ARR when we first mentioned it in our newsletter in December 2020. $40M+ ARR today.

VEED was in the Exploding Topics database (and being specifically signposted to subscribers) while it was still bootstrapped. It was over a year before the first outside funding came in: a $35M investment from Sequoia.

Back when Exploding Topics first featured it, search volume was 8K per month. It’s now above 200K, and peaked as high as 400K last September.

If nothing else, you could have benefited from being an early user of the toolkit. Clearly, VEED has proved its worth in the video generation market.

But there were other opportunities too: YouTube tutorials, potential affiliate partnerships, perhaps even the chance to invest.

And instead of needing to know exactly what to look for (like with a tool such as Google Trends), Exploding Topics made it impossible for you to miss it.

Start finding the next big things

Now you should have a better idea of the kind of advantage you get from Exploding Topics.

And it’s important to remember that these are just some of the more striking examples. You’ll get just as much value (if not more) from being reliably early to slightly smaller, less eye-catching trends.

You can get 8 of these insights per week sent straight to your inbox, curated by our trends experts. And you can search the full database for yourself to find the rising trends specific to your niche.

If you’re an SEO professional, E-commerce store owner, or early-stage investor, Exploding Topics is an invaluable trend discovery tool for you. Sign up today for your free trial.