Jan 18, 2022 — By Igor Krasnik
2021 was an intense year for the technology world, after slowed down 2020.
Everything related to technology was growing.
VC funds deployed $621B — twice the previous record from 2020 ($311B).
Increased VC funding created more startups. Affordable technology lowered build cost and shortened time-to-market.
This has led to increased demand on tech talent globally. There were more job opportunities than available qualified people to handle the jobs.
Here are 4 strong trends from 2021:
- Technology becomes simpler and affordable
- Individuals build lean companies in public
- Every company is a media company
- Digital world gains more value
I’ll cover all 4 of them below.
Technology becomes simpler and affordable
Technology simplifies human interactions. It helps us to achieve way better results with way smaller resources.
But often extensive use of technology leads to the opposite results. Instead of focusing on the outcome, teams find themselves struggling with the technology itself.
There are dozens of engineering roles today. Back-end/front-end/full-stack developers, DBAs, DevOps, DevRel, QA, mobile, IOT etc. All roles have their own history and the need.
But the fact is — delivery process should be improved significantly. The less steps you take to get the result → the less people needed to build and support → the more effective and leaner is the process itself. And the more value is added by any individual in the process.
You don’t need to spend years on learning programming and computer science to build digital products. New kind of tools emerge to solve common tech problems. You know this category of tools as no-code, low-code, workflow automation etc.
No-code tools are used by individuals, startups and enterprises. It’s a firm trend and there’s no reason for the trend to stop.
That’s what technology is all about — simplifying difficult processes.
Individuals build lean companies in public
Simple tools can automate most of any real-life processes. Anyone can launch online business from their bedroom.
That’s why more creative individuals building their products as a solo-founders. They grow an audience on social media that promotes their business and generate cash. They use online communities for help and support when they stuck.
For many solopreneurs their projects are a “side-hustle” with limited time to invest. There’s no time to overthink features when you building. It led to rethinking the MVP nature and extreme shortening of the time needed to launch a product.
Solopreuners prefer more launch attempts to more time spent on a single “big” ideas that doesn’t take off. It leads to more products, Micro-SaaS, launched by individuals.
This in turn led to explosive growth of “building in public” and open startups.
Trends #0027 - Million-Dollar, One-Person Businesses
Get Full Access to Trends Pro "Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs." You want freedom and equity. You're willing to work hard. But on your terms. Leverage. What do you mean? These power million-dollar, one-person businesses. Code, distribution and manufacturing are being commoditized.
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In 2021 new SaaS marketplaces appeared that allow listing, bidding and selling SaaS online. MicroAcquire and Microns allow to sell your startup at any phase, instead of searching for buyers directly and paying a significant cut to a broker for the deal.
MicroAcquire is built in public by Andrew Gazdecki being the one of the most influential accounts in startup world in 2021. They’ve attracted $6.3M last summer followed by integrations with Pipe, AngelList, Founderpath, Capchase.
Rapid building transforms to a movement. Individuals and small teams challenge themselves to build, grow and sell startup in as little as just 30 days. Follow #BuildSell30 and BuildSell30 for updates.
Want to dig more into indiehacking/solopreunership?
- Read https://makebook.io/ by Peter Levels for practical advice
- Join https://www.indiehackers.com for community support
- Subscribe to https://trends.vc to monitor trends
- Follow builders: Peter Levels, Damon Chan Justin Welsh, Ben Stokes (Tiny Projects), Mackenzie Child
Every company is a media company
How does a company attract talent and customers? How to convince prospects that your product is better and more valuable than a competitor? How to stand out in the noise of thousands of other companies?
Companies need to build a bold brand to win. Strong online presence helps to lead the niche and distinguish between competition.
Best brands are based on the high quality content. To grow a company strong media production is the need rather than an afterthought. Companies have to build and maintain their social networks, websites, blog, product wiki+updates, communities, podcasts, videos.
Managing content is difficult. It’s often more effective to acquire existing media company than to build in-house. In 2021, The Hustle was acquired by Hubspot, and Makerpad was acquired by Zapier. Before that, Stripe has acquired IndieHackers in 2017.
Individual content creators are in high hiring demand too, as building personal brands become more popular.
Linear.fm
Voices of the creators building with Linear
linear.app
Digital world gains more value
Metaverse
Mark Zukerberg came up with “Metaverse” during Facebook cringy presentation. Viewers were distracted on jokes around CGI world and Zuck with Feta.
But the main idea of Metaverse is pretty straightforward and not something completely new.
The world is moving towards full-digitalizing. The moment in time when digital goods become more valuable than their physical counterparts we all enter Metaverse.
How much time do you spend behind the screen of your computer and mobile? Do you care more about your offline reputation or online image?
Web3
If you want to invest into an early-stage startup you need to be an accredited investor. To become an accredited investor, you rather need to own the fortune or work in VC firm. (But interesting enough, you don’t have to be accredited to lose your last penny on gambling and sport betting)
This turns VC firms into monopoly as it favours wealthy investors over small checks.
Blockchain fixes that. It allows companies to raise directly from people in the form of tokens (or governance tokens). It allows creators to sell their creative work directly without intermediary cut.
2021 was a year of relaunching blockchain after ICOs explosion back in 2017:
- Venture capital invested a record $30 billion in crypto in 2021, more than quadruple previous high. There’s a controversial opinion on this manner — wouldn’t be VC a next centralized authority instead of a tech giant companies?
- The market for NFTs, digital art and assets tied to the blockchain, hit $25B in 2021. But there is still a growth opportunity — the traditional art market is still dominant, with 2021 total volume of $69B. See this video to understand the flows of the traditional art market.
- Tesla bought $1.5B in Bitcoin, accept BTC and meme-coin Dogecoin as a payment.
- Jack Dorsey, known by it’s interest in Bitcoin and blockchain, left Twitter and renamed Square to Block
- El Salvador formally adopted BTC to run alongside with a USD
- To attract more companies into their network, all the major blockchain offers grant programs. See Near ($800M Grants), Fantom ($300M Incentives), Solana, Polkadot, Cosmos, Fantom.
The global crypto market cap is $2.23T, with Bitcoin and Ethereum accumulative share of ~60%. It’s still a small percent of technology market cap but total amount invested continues to grow crazy every year.
Reg CF
To compete with blockchain opportunities, SEC has approved Regulation CrowdFunding (Reg CF) that allows companies to raise smaller individual payments from anyone.
Gumroad, the very first Reg CF issuer, raised $5M from 7697 investors during a single day and proved the need of this raising model.
Republic is the most noticeable platform for raising and investing via Reg CF and Crypto companies.
Web3 controversy
Cryptocurrencies, DAOs, NFTs; — they all existed for around a decade, but suddenly turn into buzzwords this year.
Blockchain enters the second hype cycle phase.
Sadly, blockchain rebranded to Web3 led to hot arguments that divided people on 2 sides.
The first side strongly believes that Web3 and decentralization is the only possible future. The second group thinks that blockchain is hyped, overcomplicated and impractical technology.
No matter what you personally think about blockchain — the companies built on top of it raise extensive funding. You’ll see more blockchain in your life in upcoming years one way or another.
Knowledge is never zero-sum. AR, ML, NLP, ETL, Blockchain, NFT, DAO — all the technologies worth investigating.
Remember how Twitter blocked Trump’s account early 2021?
That’s it!
2021 was intense. It laid the foundation for big events that we yet to see in 2022.
To recap, I’ve walked you through 4 major 2021 trends:
- Technology becomes simpler and affordable
- Individuals build lean companies in public
- Every company is a media company
- Digital world gains more value
I hope you learned something new and enjoyed the article!
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