Dare to be different...Two trends for 2025 to think about

As the second half of the year Zoomed (hehe, pun intended) by at the speed of light, I’m sitting here trying to count how many human work days this year my team has collectively wasted because none of the tools we are using dares to have any opinion. Result: We’re drowning in revops, and have very, very little time left to do what we’ve been really hired to do - marketing. Let me explain. When you buy a piece of software today it’s like buying IKEA flatpack furniture. Couples are most likely to divorce over assembling the Billy bookcase for a reason. Now, imagine that IKEA bookcase being assembled by 3 different remote teams - say marketing, sales, and ops. Now - also imagine the instructions were machine translated from Chinese, and you’re missing a few parts.

No, it wasn’t a mistake - you need 15 screws, but there were only 5 in the box? IKEA wants you to upgrade to their premium Billy plan for just another $3,999! But first, you need to jump on a series of 4 really quick discovery calls to learn about the history and importance of screwdom. We’re spending more time assembling the campaigns and reporting on them than working on the actual creatives. But there’s something even more perverse in this: nobody wants to be creative. ‘Analytical’ is what got one hired for decades. ‘Creative’ in B2B? Sounds dangerous. Because what if…what if you…polarise? This applies to both marketing, and product. Especially product. You don’t want to alienate anyone with your design opinions, or your workflow philosophy! So you’re designing this perfectly use-case agnostic, universal tool for ‘men and women, aged 18-75’. T that everyone can use…and hardly anyone can actually use.

Enter 'luxury' software products. 

Much like we crave crafted, scarce products once everything becomes commoditized (think Nike vs. basic sneakers, Michelin-starred dining vs. fast food), a similar trend is creeping into software, at least according to Scott Belsky. Tools that are actually opinionated like Superhuman (imagine being opinionated about things as boring as email...), Cron, and Arc or Papermark (Docusign but for startups founders working on termsheets - doesn't get any more niche than that 🤯) aren't just solving problems — they're polished, opinionated, and they have that unmistakable touch of intentionality.

Maybe, just maybe, luxury software is the antidote to the commodified chaos we’re all drowning in.

Enter 'unbundling'

Another big trend I already see coming in product is unbundling. Similarly to 'luxury product' - unbundled products cater to niche tastes - and compete with depth, rather than breadth of the solution: 

As a longtime user of Unbounce's no-code landing page editor, I recently had the dubious pleasure of using HubSpot Marketing's landing pages. You could tell that the specialist tool is sooo much better. Hence - unbundling became the counter-trend to bundling. Instead of adding more products - some companies decided to kill some of their products and ruthlessly specialize to be the best of their kind - but for only one thing. 

It never harms to understand your users better. 

User psychology is everything. YC makes their incubees talk to 10 customers every week. And you're never too grown up to do so either. So if you want to understand your users better - join our upcoming webinar on the psychology of UX, with a guest speaker Kate Syuma - author at Growth Mates and former Head of Growth Product Design at Miro! 

See you next week! 

Emilia from Userpilot