Happy Trends Tuesday!

Last week I was in Boston, meeting many of my coworkers for the very first time. 

Remote work is great, but it’s exciting to finally have proof that these folks actually exist. I mean... deep fakes are getting pretty wild, and now Sora's on its way to blur all our realities. 

Speaking of, how do y'all feel about the future of AI videos? Let us know.

- Cyan

In today's email…

• How to get beastly (financial) gains in animal-inspired workouts
• “It’s AI’s world, we’re just living in it” – 2 new tech to back this shit up
• What we’re surfin’, from Sora videos to Canva’s investment in CustomGPTs

Let's hop to it!

🌾 FARM MORE 5-STAR REVIEWS

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🚀 WHERE TO BUILD NEXT

How to harness the roaring trend of animal-inspired workouts 

Source: Tenor

The regime has been around for a while, but received renewed attention in recent years: 

• #Primalmovement has 2.4B+ views on TikTok
• This animal flow tutorial gets 1.4m views on YouTube
• Pinterest searches for “primal movements” grew 120% from 2022 to 2023

The moves may look goofy, but they target muscles that we normally neglect, enhancing body awareness, agility, and a host of other benefits. 

Even better, you can do this bodyweight exercise wherever there’s a floor, making it an easy way to break up a sedentary workday. 

The opportunity: fun in fitness

Business builders can tap into today’s fun-craving consumers and organize their own “animal fitness” classes. Rent out yoga/dance studios or other community spaces, and offer private bookings for birthday parties or corporate events. 

You can niche down and target audience with different fitness goals, such as:

📱Teens: They spend 7+ hours per day looking at screens… A fun, animal-inspired workout with peers could be just what they need to improve mental health, posture, and social skills. 

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Families with young children: It’s an opportunity to do silly movements together – something parents might be too busy for normally – and form deeper bonds. 

Or, host a training program to certify primal movement instructors. Partner with existing trainers who can design the curriculum. You can take care of the logistics and marketing. 

A 2-day workshop offered by Primal Play brings in ~$663 per participant. Similar programs cost $659 at Animal Flow. 

2. Humans want to exercise with animals

To channel our inner beasts during a workout, sometimes we need said beasts (reads: puppies) to be there and cheer us on. 

Source: Google Trends, six months rolling average.

Workout sessions with cute animals are becoming increasingly in demand. “Goat yoga” gets 40k searches per month globally, per Ahrefs. 

One puppy pilates session got 1.5m views on TikTok – it was hosted by Woof Wellness, a NYC-based fitness studio that lets you exercise with rescue pups and adopt them.  

Pet parents are also connecting with their fur babies by working out together, and their activities are not limited to the gym. Some sports enthusiasts would even take their pups to wilder adventures (safely). 

The opportunity: fashionably fit

Lululemon became a $56B+ company by making high-quality yoga pants when yoga was getting popular. With any fitness trend, you can usually count on fashion to follow suit. 

The pet clothing industry is set to reach $7B by 2028, and you can take a share by selling animal-inspired athleisure clothing, or matching sporty outfits for people who exercise with their pets. 

Imagine matching swimsuits, ski suits, or rollerblading outfits… You can leverage AI for the design, and work with “petfluencers” to promote your product. 

From shedding to shredding. Source: SnowBrains

Don’t just settle on aesthetics – partner with material scientists or biomimicry experts, and use animal adaptation mechanisms to design performance-enhancing workout gear.

🔎 OUR LATEST OBSESSIONS

Oops, AI did it again

We're not an AI newsletter, but there are times when we couldn't help but feel blown away by the tech. So here are two new AI developments that made waves before they're even accessible to the public. 

Source: Marketing Directo

For $349, you can pre-order a pair of Lennon-style frames that allow you to talk to a 24/7 AI assistant, read foreign language signs, see calories in your next meal... and a host of other fun AI functions.

Frame is integrated with Perplexity AI, promising search capabilities that rival Google's Gemini. It’s supposed to be fast and reliable, but we won’t know until the first batch releases on April 15.

The company is open-sourced, so you can poke around in their code if you're curious. 

They also have a monocle option, made for "the imaginative hacker" — what that means is it’ll help programmers imagine themselves as crafty watchmakers.

Sora (because duh)

Remember our new year prediction survey? More than half of our readers voted “AI video tools” as the top trend in 2024. 

And boy, were y’all smart.

As I’m writing this, OpenAI’s text-to-video tool, Sora, is breaking the Internet. Sam Altman himself is taking prompt orders on X and spitting out surreal (but also like, super real) clips. 

However you might feel about the implications of its capabilities, it’s hard not to be in awe of the technology.

Seeing X users rush to offer cool prompts for Altman to pick, I got the feeling that a new wave of prompt engineers will emerge from this.

Except this time it’ll be a creative arms race. We’re not just aiming for productivity, or engineering AI so it gives us answers. We’re looking for art, storytelling, conception… things that elicit powerful emotions.

You don’t need to always create new prompts, either. Reimagining classic scenes or characters from literary works, especially ones with wide-ranging interpretations, will also be a promising use of Sora. 

🗂️ OPEN TABS

🎨 Case study: Is Canva's investment in CustomGPTs paying off?

🍝 Brain food: Savor this deliciously simple AI explainer

🌠 From X: 10 Sora-generated videos so real they'll give you chills

📺 Watch: Trends OG Steph Smith on using ChatGPT to uncover big ideas