Software Rewind 2021

It’s a new year. New software is coming. Thank you so much to all of my followers and viewers. 2021 has really been an interesting year for the software industry. We have seen so many different types of products, whether it’s the AI industry, whether it’s the email or something third. And today I will go through the five biggest trends that I have seen in 2021, and then I will end the video talking about what I expect for 2022.

1. Software Trend 5: Speech to Text
2. Software Trend 4: Churning Lifetime Customers
3. Software Trend 3: No coding platforms
4. Software Trend 2: Email marketing software
5. Software Trend 1: AI Copywriting
6. My predictions for Software Trends in 2022

Software Trend 5: Speech to Text

But let’s just dive into the first trend, which is speech to text and the other way around. We have seen products like Happy Scribe, Listenr, Blog audio and Speechelo, and so many more where they make it possible to convert text to speech and speech to text.

This means that I can easily transcribe my YouTube videos and make an article talking about the YouTube video I have just made. This is powered by AI, and we will see a lot more of these types of products. Of course, they can still be fine tuned, but this is the fifth biggest trend that I have seen in 2021 and it really makes the life easier.

Software Trend 4: Churning Lifetime Customers

Now the fourth trend that I have seen is lifetime deals churning their lifetime customers. We have seen it with BCAST and we’ve seen it with Botstar.

We have also seen it with other products, but these two were the most defined products. What they did was that they basically went out and they told their Lifetime customers that they could no longer support them because it was too expensive for them. This means that they wanted to try and convert their Lifetime Deal users over to subscription users, and it was really great to see how the entire community came together and was fighting this because it’s really not okay to do. When you offer a Lifetime deal, it is for the lifetime of the software.

If the company is closing down, there’s nothing we can do. But if it’s because they are not creating enough revenue, then the Lifetime users is really the last place they should go, because the Lifetime users, they just bring so much value to the product.

All of the feedback that they give is really defining the product for the actual subscription users. So I’m really happy to see that all of this was turned around both by AppSumo, but mainly by all of the Lifetime users coming together as one unit and fighting this. So we would not lose the product. So I really hope that the software deals who were thinking about doing this will find another solution.

Software Trend 3: No coding platforms

The third trend we have seen in 2021 is no coding platforms.

This means that you can build an entire product with zero coding knowledge. This means that we will also see many more types of different products because you can easily take an idea and turn it into a product with no coding knowledge, and this takes a few weeks to do. But this also means that we see a lower quality in the products coming out and more and more of the products they’re closing down faster. And what these products also need to think about is that in the end, if they get a success, they need to convert their entire code base into actual code because otherwise it will just be too expensive running on these no coding platforms.

But it’s a great way to test out an idea to see whether it has value behind it.

Software Trend 2: Email marketing software

The second biggest trend in 2021 is email marketing software. We have seen so many different types of alternatives to Activecampaign. Up until the beginning of 2020, ActiveCampaign was just the number one in the industry. But in 2021 we have seen products like EnCharge, Kirim.email and Inbox really popping up surfacing and trying to fight for the number one spot in the email marketing software. Of course we have had software like MailChimp, SendGrid and so on for a long time, but ActiveCampaign they differ on all of the integrations they have and their flow builder.

This means that you can easily build email marketing drip campaigns, you can integrate to numerous other platforms and so much more with Active Campaign, and this is what both Encharge, Kirim.email and Inbox is trying to do. They’re just doing it at a much easier plan, and it’s really interesting because the competition in the industry basically means that we get better products. So I hope to see many more products and of course these products will establish themselves and just create better features.

Software Trend 1: AI Copywriting

Now the biggest trend in 2021 is AI copywriting software.

GPT-3 was released in a closed beta in the beginning of 2021 and a lot of founders grabbed this opportunity to create a great product for us to generate text because these AI copywriting tools are great for SEO, they’re great for generating ideas and even generating blog posts.

The best blog post I have seen coming out is from Frase.io. But if we take for the more short form content, for instance, if you need to do social media posting, if you just need an introduction to a blog post or something similar, then Nichesss and ConversionAI they’re really great products. Nichesss was one of the first ones servicing and establishing themselves as an AI copywriting tool. Whereas ConversionAI, which is the number one in the industry, they took a different approach buying small players to make themselves the number one player in the industry.

It’s really interesting to see what will happen in 2022 with all of these products because it is limited how much they can improve their self using GPT-3 before GPT-4 is being released.

Now the last AI copywriting software I just want to mention is Rytr. Rytr was awarded the best product of 2021 on AppSumo. This means that it was not only one of the most sold products, but it was also one of the best products, both on the UX part, but also on the features. They generated great content and the features were easy to use and they just met the user need.

My Predictions for Software Trends in 2022

Now for 2022, I am really excited to see what will happen in the software industry. I have four predictions I think will happen and the first one I really hope will happen is GPT-4.

Right now the release date is set to 1 January 2023, but I do hope that they will release it in a closed beta in the end of 2022. So we can see even better products like Nichesss, ConversionAI and in the same sense, I hope that they are allowed to take on the GPT-4 and just elaborate their products to make them even better. It will really be interesting to see.

Furthermore, SEO is still a hot subject in 2022. It’s a great revenue stream or at least to create some traffic to your website.

So I think we will see even more SEO products and we will see products like Frase.io create better features to be able to generate better blog posts and better articles, so we can rank higher on Google. And overall, I think we will also see more AI incorporated into SEO so we can not only generate content, but we can also analyse our page and compare to all of the competitors out there. It’s really an interesting year for SEO.

Another trend for 2021 is short form content. We’ve seen it both within TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, and this is something that’s really here to stay.

It’s so popular and it’s a huge subject in the industry. So I think in 2022 we will really see some products being able to support this. And we’ve seen products like Wave.video and Invideo where they make it possible to create videos for Twitter and for Facebook and even Pinterest. But we cannot create these portrait videos as easy as we do with TikTok and YouTube. So I think if there is a product out there that will make it possible to create these short form content videos to add a lot of filters, a lot of small things to the video to make it special.

Then this product will really excel in 2022 because the short form content is here to stay.

Now the last thing I think we will see in 2022 is more AI tools, not only GPT-4 to generate content, but prediction, because with AI, we can train the algorithms to predict so much data we can make them predict social media posts. We can make them predict how a marketing campaign will perform, and so much more because 2021 has really been a data year for AI and the more data we have, the easier it is for AI to predict all of the performance for the different campaigns, for text, even for blog post on SEO.

So I think this is really an interesting subject as well, but that is my predictions for 2022.

Please let me know in the comments section down below. What do you think will happen in 2022 and which of these trends do you agree with? Thank you so much for watching. Let’s catch up on the next one.