Searches for “ear cleaning kits” are up 226% over the last two years.
What are they?
Ear cleaning kits typically contain silicone wax removers, metal picks, or irrigation systems.
And they're quickly becoming a best-selling product category on Amazon.
(In fact, one of the top-selling ear kit brands on Amazon grosses an estimated $171k per month.)
What's next:
Ear cleaning kits are part of the ear health meta trend.
Ear cleaning as a medical treatment has been around for centuries. But ear cleaning products and services began growing as a mainstream, non-medical trend in Japan in the mid-2000s.
And more recently we’ve seen the same start to happen in the West:
Ear drops that soften the wax for easier extraction.
FIFINE is a microphone brand specializing in USB microphones.
The brand has become especially popular thanks to their USB condenser mics. Along with recommendations from tech influencers on YouTube (like Linus Tech Tips).
Their most popular USB mic on Amazon generates approximately $468k in monthly gross revenue.
What's next:
FIFINE is part of the podcast equipment meta trend.
As podcasting has exploded in popularity, so has demand for high-quality microphones.
(In fact, retail microphone sales have increased from $281.2M to $455M over the last 10 years).
The current leader in this space, ClickFunnels, is a bootstrapped business that recently hit 9-figures in annual revenue.
But ClickFunnels is far from the only funnel software startup out there. Drip and GrooveFunnels are two other examples of growing companies in this space.
What's next:
Funnel software is part of the “accessible martech” meta trend.
Accessible martech includes marketing SaaS tools that don’t require lengthy demos or live sales calls in order to try or buy the product. They also tend to have a relatively simple UI.
Examples of companies driving this trend include Mangools, Later, and Wavve.
Searches for non-fungible tokens have increased by 850% since we first covered it back in November.
So we thought we’d take another look at this exploding topic.
A non-fungible token (NFT) is a digital representation of something with unique properties.
Like Bitcoin, NFTs are cryptographic tokens. But unlike Bitcoin, each token represents a one-of-a-kind item.
For example, a piece of artwork is unique and therefore “non-fungible”. Which is why NFTs are now gaining traction as a way to certify ownership of each piece. In fact, Christie’s auction house recently sold its first NFT “Block 21” for $131,250.
What's next:
NFTs are part of the Tokenize Everything meta trend. There were only approximately 73 players in the NFT ecosystem in September. Today, there are 125 active NFT tokens. Examples of this meta trend include virtual real estate in Decentraland, digital artwork on Async Art, and “.crypto” domains via Unstoppable Domains.