Whatnot

East-to-West Trend Pipeline: spot Asian consumer trends before they cross over

Several major Western consumer trends — live streaming, mobile gaming, live shopping — appeared in Asia years before hitting the US. Shaan argues you can predict future US hits by studying what's currently dominant in China, Japan, Korea, and India.

“before there was live streaming, that was obviously a huge one. Mobile gaming. So internationally, uh, the biggest and most popular games were all on your phone. There weren't Xbox, PlayStation, that they really didn't have like big console or PC culture. And so games like, uh, Free Fire or PUBG Mobile were huge. And then Fortnite became the version of that in the US soon after. And so you could sort of see these trends moving over. Live shopping has been huge in Asia for a long time. Now Whatnot is the US equivalent of live shopping worth $10 billion. And so you can kind of look for these products that are over there and try to see when and how will they translate.”

Steal thisIdentify one consumer behavior exploding in East Asia right now and build the Western equivalent before it arrives.