Stop following trends. Start creating them.

Entrepreneurs love trends.

AI. Web3. NFTs. Craft beer. Oat milk. Plant-based meat. Subscription boxes. Whatever happens to be exploding on LinkedIn, TikTok or in the business press this month.

And I understand why.

You see somebody building a fast-growing business and naturally think: I could do that.

The problem is that by the time everybody is talking about a trend, you may already be too late.

Consider NFTs. In the first half of 2021, NFT sales exploded from just $13.7 million a year earlier to around $2.5 billion. By the end of 2021, annual sales had reached roughly $25 billion.

Entrepreneurs, investors and established businesses piled in.

Then the market turned. Monthly sales on OpenSea fell from nearly $5 billion at their January 2022 peak to around $700 million by June.

If you spotted the opportunity before everyone else, there was potentially money to be made. If you spent 18 months building an NFT business because you would read that NFTs were the future, you could have arrived just in time for the party to finish.

And we have seen the same thing repeatedly in consumer markets.

Craft beer exploded and suddenly everybody wanted to start a brewery. Oat milk took off and supermarket shelves filled with alternatives. Plant-based meat became one of the hottest investment categories in food and spawned countless competitors.

Eventually supply catches up with  –  and sometimes overtakes  –  demand.

The UK had 100 fewer breweries at the beginning of 2025 than a year earlier, according to the Society of Independent Brewers and Associates. Even Beyond Meat, one of the businesses that helped create the modern plant-based meat category, now acknowledges persistent weakness in demand and increased competition; its revenues fell another 11.6% in the first half of 2026.

That does not mean craft beer, oat milk or plant-based food were bad ideas.

Quite the opposite.

The original ideas were brilliant.

What was less brilliant was the army of businesses that subsequently looked at their success and effectively said: I will have some of that.

Do not look for trends. Look for change.

There is an important distinction between identifying a trend and identifying the reason a trend is happening.

The second is far more valuable.

Rather than seeing the success of oat milk and deciding to launch another oat milk, ask why consumers started buying it.

Is there a long-term movement towards plant-based products? Are people questioning the environmental impact of traditional products? Are allergies or dietary choices changing? Are consumers willing to pay more for products that align with their values?

Those questions might lead you somewhere completely different.

And that is where innovation starts.

Great entrepreneurs do not simply look at what consumers are buying today. They look at how the world is changing and what people might need tomorrow.

Before committing your money and probably several years of your life to an idea, I think there are five questions worth asking.

How big is the market?

A brilliant product in a tiny market is still a tiny business. Understand how many potential customers genuinely exist, what they spend and whether the market is growing.

Is your product genuinely different?

Being 5% cheaper or having nicer packaging is not necessarily innovation. What have you created that gives customers a compelling reason to change their behaviour?

Better still, what do you own? Intellectual property, technology, formulations, patents, data, brand, supply-chain knowledge or simply expertise that is extremely difficult for somebody else to replicate can all create defensibility.

If your entire business can be copied next Tuesday, somebody probably will.

How are you going to reach the customer?

I see entrepreneurs obsess over products and barely think about distribution.

You can have the greatest product in the world sitting in a warehouse.

Route to market matters.

Who already owns the customer relationship? Retailers? Distributors? Amazon? Social platforms? Wholesalers? Direct sales teams?

And what will it actually cost you to acquire customers through those channels?

Do you have the skills to win?

Spotting an opportunity does not automatically mean you are the right person to exploit it.

Ask yourself what unfair advantage you bring.

Knowledge? Relationships? Manufacturing expertise? Technology? Distribution? Brand building? Capital?

If the answer is “none of those, but the market looks really hot”, I would be very careful.

And finally…

How are you going to fund it?

Entrepreneurs consistently underestimate the amount of capital required between having an idea and creating a successful company.

Product development, stock, people, marketing and distribution consume cash long before the business reaches meaningful scale.

Work out what success actually costs  –  not just what it costs to launch.

The followers rarely get paid

There is another reason I prefer original ideas.

The biggest rewards usually go to the businesses that create something valuable and defensible, rather than the hundreds that subsequently copy them.

Originators have time to build brands, intellectual property, distribution relationships, expertise and customer loyalty before everyone else arrives.

Followers often enter precisely when competition is increasing, customer acquisition is becoming more expensive and margins are starting to fall.

They have taken almost the same entrepreneurial risk for potentially much less reward.

Of course, being first does not guarantee success. Sometimes pioneers simply make expensive mistakes that somebody else learns from.

So I am not suggesting you need to invent something the world has never seen before.

Innovation can mean taking an existing product and fundamentally improving it. It can mean a new business model, a new material, a new distribution method or solving an existing problem dramatically better.

But there needs to be a reason for your business to exist beyond “somebody else seems to be making money doing this.”

Because if you have spotted their success, so have thousands of other people.

Entrepreneurship is not about predicting what everybody will be talking about next year.

It is about understanding what customers will need next year  –  before everybody starts talking about it.

So stop asking:

What’s the next big trend?

Start asking:

What’s changing, what problem does that create, and can I solve it better than anybody else?

That is where the genuinely interesting businesses come from.

And, more often than not, that is where the money is made.

Elite entrepreneurs do not follow the trend. They create the reason everyone else follows it.

Key takeaways

• By the time a trend is widely discussed in the business press, the opportunity has often already peaked – the NFT market and craft beer boom both illustrate how fast followers can be left holding the costs.
• Rather than copying a trend, ask why it emerged: understanding the underlying shift in consumer behaviour is far more valuable than replicating the product that first exploited it.
• Before committing to any idea, test it against four questions: how big is the market, is your product genuinely different, how will you reach the customer, and do you have the skills to win?
• The biggest rewards go to businesses that create something defensible – brand, IP, distribution relationships and customer loyalty – giving them time to build before competitors arrive.
• Entrepreneurship is not about predicting what everyone will be talking about next year. It is about understanding what customers will need next year, before everyone starts talking about it.

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