Trends

This week’s research comes courtesy of Trendster Steph Smith, whose new e-book “Doing Content Right” is a comprehensive guide to building and scaling your own publication. She’ll teach you how to define your niche, decide what to write for whom, test and scale distribution platforms, and grow a loyal audience — through 200+ pages of insights and dozens of exercises to help you learn.

Helen Ruth Elam (AKA “Baddie Winkle”, AKA “Bad Lil Baddie”) has 3.7m followers on Instagram. She is 92 years old and says she’s been “stealing ur man since 1928!!”

For a brief time in the mid-2010s the well-known notebook brand Moleskine was listed as a publicly traded company on the Milanese stock exchange. In their 2015 financial statements, they reported a whopping ~27% operating profit margin.

In a single day last week, a small army of software companies filed to go public. 

When President Emmanuel Macron came to power in 2017, the former investment banker vowed to make France “a nation of unicorns.” 

What does it mean to land a spot on the Inc. 5000 list? Ask a dozen different people, and you’ll likely get a dozen different answers, ranging from solemn admiration (“It means you have a great company”) to wry skepticism (“It’s nothing but a marketing ploy”).

This is the first in a series of articles in which we investigate trends in different parts of the world, show how companies are responding to those trends, and provide lessons you can apply to your business.  

(Lindsay Kaplan & Carolyn Childers are printing Benjamins with their modern, women-centric executive peer group, Chief)

The Trends SMB Database offers a snapshot of the financials, insights, and lessons learned by 200+ founders across a range of industries. We ask business owners and operators a number of questions, including: