Hey,

 

Here’s this week’s list of rapidly trending topics, insights and analysis.

 

Snack boxes are subscription services that deliver a box of snacks each month. Each service typically focuses on a category or theme, like vegan or gluten free.

 

For example, Bokksu features snacks from Japan. Love With Food focuses on healthy snacks. And SnackNation provides snack boxes as an employee perk.

 

94% of Americans snack at least once per day. And the global healthy snack market is set to grow to $32.3B by 2025. 

 

Snack boxes are one of the key beneficiaries of this trend. In fact, the number of people that purchased snacks online has grown by 46% since January.

What's next:
Snack boxes are part of the Monthly Subscription Box meta trend. 54% of American consumers state that they subscribe to at least one monthly subscription box. Growing brands in this space include ButcherBox, Cratejoy, BarkBox, and FabFitFun.

 

Discord is free messaging software with text, video and voice chat built in. It’s designed for gamers to create online communities. Though with 250M user accounts, Discord is also used for non-gamer communities, online teaching and more.

 

A Discord bot tackles and automates away some of the challenges from running Discord communities. Chief among those problems is moderation.

 

Discord bots are often used for non moderation purposes too. Some automatically share content from social sources such as Twitter and YouTube. Others encourage community discussion with user leaderboards, awards and mini-games.

 

The general purpose bot Loritta bills itself as “yet another Discord bot”. Yet, as of writing, it runs on 840K Discord servers.

 

And countless more bots exist on the Discord Bot List website top.gg. With the most popular receiving millions of monthly upvotes.

What's next:
Discord bots are part of the community building and social automation meta trends. Other examples of bots taking off in this category include ManyChat (Facebook), Standuply (Slack) and Hypefury (Twitter).

 

600 startup founders have banded together to share which growth marketing tactics are working best for them each month. They share them in their newsletter.

 

Chickpea bread is bread made from chickpea flour.

 

This is just one of many examples of the skyrocketing interest in foods containing chickpeas.

 

In fact, Technavio estimates that the global chickpea market will grow to $3.5B by 2022 at a 4% CAGR — largely thanks to growing demand for pre-packaged chickpea foods.

 

Other examples of this trend include chickpea snacks, chickpea pizza and Hippeas.

 

And earlier this month the chickpea protein powder startup InnovoPro raised a $3M Series B round.

What's next:

Chickpea bread is part of the Grain Free Bread meta trend. According to the IFIC, 8% of Americans follow a keto diet. Which is leading to growing demand for low-carb, grain-free flours and bread products. Other examples of this trend include chestnut flour, almond meal, coconut wraps, and hazelnut flour.

 

Mangools is a low-cost SEO software suite aimed at small businesses and solopreneurs.

 

Many SEO SaaS products (like SEMrush and Ahrefs) have gradually pivoted toward enterprise customers. Today, typical pricing for a mid-tier plan on a leading SEO software suite is around $200/month.

 

While they don’t offer the same level of features as enterprise-level SEO tools, Mangools’s mid-tier plan is around $40/month.

 

Overall, at a 14.83% CAGR, SEO software is one of the fastest-growing martech segments.

What's next:
Mangools is part of the Accessible Martech meta trend. Martech is notorious for stodgy practices, like product demos and lengthy contracts. But we’re seeing an increasing number of martech companies bucking this trend, like Canva, Wavve, and Later.com.

We hope you enjoyed this week's Exploding Topics Tuesday. See you next week.

 

Talk Soon,
Brian, Josh and Kyle

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