Dru Riley — How Trends.vc Turned Market Research into a Subscription Business

Trends.vc, created by Dru Riley, is a content business that researches new markets and business models and delivers them to founders. It grew by attracting readers with free reports and selling Trends Pro, which contains deeper analysis, and a founder community. As a former software developer, he placed at the center of the business the work of reducing the time others needed to understand a market and examine business opportunities.

How a Developer Came to Write Reports

Riley graduated from college in 2012, taught himself Ruby on Rails, and worked as a software engineer in Atlanta. In 2017, he left his job to explore a business of his own, and the funds he had set aside at the time were about USD 250,000. He then tried several projects, but it took about three years after going independent to generate his first revenue.

The direct starting point for Trends.vc was another project called SaaSReport. Riley explained that because he was not the target customer for that service, it was difficult to gauge customer response, and the work did not progress as much as he had hoped. In contrast, he became absorbed in researching new markets to the point of losing track of time, and he began to turn this interest into separate content.

The first report, published with encouragement from the founder group Zero to One Makers, was “Cloud Kitchens” on February 10, 2020. It covered delivery-only restaurants and shared kitchens while outlining major operators, market outlook, and viable business opportunities. By presenting opportunities not only in starting restaurants but also in delivery packaging and operations management software, it looked from the beginning at the multiple businesses created by a single change.

Putting a Repeatable Format into Short Reports

The reports' distinguishing feature was a structure that repeated the same questions even as topics changed. They explained, in a consistent order, what problem was being solved, who was active, what would change going forward, and where opportunities were. They added counterarguments and additional resources so that readers could grasp the overview and then explore further into the parts they needed.

Dru Riley also imposed intentional constraints on length. In an April 2020 interview, he said he had increased the word-count limit for reports from an initial 300 words to 500 words, and that even when there were many options, he never put more than 10 items in one list. This approach emphasized editing to select what readers needed rather than reproducing all the research.

Paying readers already included a high proportion of people running businesses. In a 2023 interview, Riley estimated that about 60–70% of Pro members were existing business owners, and explained that among free readers there were more people looking for their next business idea. The same report served prospective founders as market research material and existing business owners as material for reviewing new technologies and business methods.

How Free Readers Become Paying Customers

An email newsletter was not there from the beginning. Riley introduced email subscriptions only after publishing six or seven reports, and later reflected that he should have started earlier. By building an email list, he could create a relationship in which he delivered new reports directly and received responses, instead of waiting for readers to return.

The first monetization experiment was to let people pre-order the next report and to use that response to decide which topic to produce. This attempt failed, but when he split the following week’s report into a free part and a paid Pro part, purchases occurred. According to early records shared in a 2021 interview, sales through Gumroad were taking place in May 2020.

Subscriptions came from reader requests. At first, Pro reports were sold one by one, but on the day sales began, several people asked for a subscription product. Riley said he remembers Patrick Campbell of ProfitWell as the first Trends Pro subscriber.

Strong material was placed in the free content as well. According to a 2021 explanation, he weighed the size and applicability of the opportunity and the importance and confidence of the prediction, put the good material up front, and released about 50–60% of it for free. The structure was to first deliver sufficient value to free readers and then sell the paid edition to those who needed more analysis.

As of November 2021, the report-focused product was USD 240 per year, the product that added community activity was USD 300 per year, and the product that provided immediate access to the mastermind, a small founders’ group, was USD 1,200 per year. At the time, new subscription products were run on an annual payment basis. Riley cited giving members enough time to experience the service while also improving the product and adding value during that period.

The catalyst that greatly increased the number of readers was the Product Hunt launch in August 2020. According to Riley, through this process email subscribers grew from about 6,000–7,000 to 25,000. He cited as an important factor that readers who had already read the free reports and experienced their value showed support during the launch.

On Twitter, he introduced reports by breaking them into multiple posts, and the people and companies featured as examples reshared them, expanding exposure. After email signup, welcome emails and follow-up emails delivered previously published good reports. Dru Riley valued link clicks alongside open rates, and he adjusted the sending order so that reports with strong responses were shown first to new subscribers.

MRR of USD 20,000 and Community Expansion

The April 29, 2022 Indie Bites interview described Trends.vc's early growth as MRR of more than USD 20,000. MRR is a metric expressing recurring subscription revenue on a monthly basis. The earlier September 15, 2020 Indie Hackers interview also described the process of growing to USD 20,000 in monthly revenue, so the 2022 material is most accurately read as a retrospective record of early growth that had already been achieved.

Audience and member scale were also disclosed separately. In a November 2021 interview, more than 45,000 email subscribers and about 1,000 Pro members were described, and in December 2023 Riley mentioned about 63,000 to 64,000 free subscribers and about 1,400 Pro members.

The community grew out of conversations with people who had read the reports. As he received replies from readers with similar backgrounds or interests, Riley introduced people individually who might benefit from knowing one another. The community expanded this so members could make such connections themselves, and by his recollection it was added about seven to eight months after the introduction of Pro reports.

At the center of community operations were recurring activities. There were daily standups where progress was shared each day, one-on-one conversations that randomly connected members, and a weekly mastermind. In effect, activities in which members drew ideas from reports, talked about their own businesses, and checked on implementation were connected into a single member experience.

From a One-Person Newsletter to a Small Organization

With the addition of the community, Riley's work changed significantly. Member operations, marketing, and team management entered days that had been focused on research and writing, and the burden of constantly moving between different tasks grew. In a 2022 interview, he explained that the process of hiring analysts included completing a single report, and that he was shifting into the role of an editor who upheld quality standards.

In 2023, Riley, an operations manager, and an editorial and analysis staff member were dividing multiple roles among themselves. Report production was organized in Process Street as a process of about 110 workflow steps, managing the person in charge, deadlines, and three rounds of revisions. Work that had depended on one person's research ability was turned into a production system that a small team could repeat.

The community was also used to find topics for future reports. Dru Riley explained that he looked at members’ progress and the concerns that emerged from meetings, and chose topics to analyze based on what they were actually exploring or struggling with.

Revenue streams gradually expanded as well. In a 2023 interview, he named the Pro subscription as the main source of revenue and said that he also ran newsletter sponsorships, fees from recommending other newsletters, and sales of e-books bundling popular reports.

The official sales page, checked in October 2026, presents a product that offers more than 160 Pro reports and a new weekly report at USD 299 per year. A product combined with the weekly mastermind is sold separately, with accumulated research materials, ongoing research, and member interaction each constituting product value.

Riley’s case shows that a developer’s entrepreneurial assets include not only coding but also research, structuring, and editing skills. What became important during growth was turning those skills into a production process and member management system that others could carry out together. Trends.vc can be summarized as a subscription-based knowledge business that began as one person’s research and grew into paid content, a community, and a small team.