The Collective: Jeremy Gutsche Shares What He’s Learned About Finding Ideas and Predicting Trends

Interviewed by Amy Molley for the June 2015 issue of Collective, Jeremy Gutsche tells the story of his life-long obsession with innovation. Having begun his entrepreneurial career at the age of six, Gutsche’s upbringing and work experiences fostered his curiosity and insatiability for cutting-edge ideas.

In the Collective article, Jeremy goes on to explain that these inquisitive and creative traits lead him to found Trend Hunter and become a top keynote speaker, fuelled with trend insight by the readers and contributors of the Trend Hunter community. The CEO also describes his strategy for selling his first book, Exploiting Chaos, and his success surrounding his latest New York Times Bestseller, Better and Faster. The interview recounts Jeremy’s quest for big ideas and walks the reader through Trend Hunter’s strategy for finding patterns and predicting what’s next.

What I’ve Learned… Jeremy Gutsche

Data is more powerful than gut intuition. Imagine a 100-million person focus group... Our homepage might look like a digital publication but I describe it as a giant research laboratory, as people across the world submit articles about exciting ideas they’ve spotted, and then we analyze how they’re received by readers. Say someone posts an article about a 3D-printed dress, what we’re measuring is: how much time do you spend on that post, how many pictures do you click through, how many times do you share it? After you’re done looking at the 3D printed dress, do you look at 3D printed shoes or link to 3D printed video games? Instead of relying on gut instinct, which is effectively the business model of the guru trend researchers around the world, we have something more powerful: big data.

Read the full article in the Collective here.