Playbook: Trend-surfing with AI

A step-by-step guide to catch a trend, build an app and ride the wave.

Ideas often go viral on social media. You will see developers as young as 19-21 are responding to the trend quickly. Can you also build an app quickly with AI and ride that trend, while it lasts?

You can even launch a studio which solely rides on such waves and builds a portfolio of small and fleeing apps.

Step 1: Prepare technologically

• Learn what it takes to ship a product end-to-end (why it is valuable)

• Be very fluent in conventional as well as very trendy frontend, backend and cloud technologies using AI-assisted coding

• Keep yourself up-to-date with the latest AI tools and techniques

Step 2: Build a social following

• Advertisement is a race to the top. Whoever has more marketing dollars will crush you

• Nowadays, you cannot pay for building a loyal social following

• Prime your audience for engaging and trying the solution you are going to build

Step 3: Trend detection

• Visit LinkedIn, X, TikTok and relevant Reddit communities daily

• Look out for things catching on (e.g., Since OpenAI and Perplexity launched Deep Research, everyone is open-sourcing their own implementation of it)

Step 4: Trend validation

• Assess the rate of growth of the trend. Is it going to last for at least a month?

• Evaluate monetization potential. Would users pay for this?

• Calculate technical feasibility within a 7-day sprint. Do you know how to build it?

• Can it recover the cost in a few months or so if launched in a week from now?

Step 5: Rapid Development Protocol

With AI-assisted coding you actually have a chance to publish something within a week (the reason why I think this way).

• Day 1: Technical architecture and setup deployment pipelines

• Day 2-4: Core feature development

• Day 5: MVP testing, polish and deployment

• Day 6-7: Marketing and launch

Step 6: Market

• Promote over your social media accounts

• Ask your followers to promote

• Hire micro-influencers, who are usually far cheaper than you can think

• Promote where the trend conversations are happening

Critical insights

• Speed-to-market matters more than perfection in trend-surfing

• Technical debt is surely acceptable if the trend's lifetime justifies it

• First-mover advantage often outweighs feature completeness

• Always pre-compute and be prepared with a starter kit that uses your preferred backend, frontend and cloud tech stack

Sometimes, a trend lasts longer than we anticipate or a trend-surfing app outlasts the trend and becomes a mainstream product. That is when we may hear some 19-21 year old outsmarted us and made millions.