Entrepreneur Office Hours: Issue #211
Aaron's 10 bold predictions for 2024
For the final EOH issue of 2023, let’s kick off this issue with a reader email:
Hi Aaron!
Around this time of year, it seems like all the big tech personalities give their predictions on what to expect from the industry in the year to come. Just curious if you’re going to weigh in with your predictions. I’d love to hear them!
Wishing you have a great holiday,
Ryan
Great idea! Instead of the normal Q&A, in this issue, I’m going to share 10 bold predictions about the tech industry for 2024. Starting with…
Prediction #1: Threads becomes a mainstream social media platform.
This is already happening, folks! If you look closely, you can see the trend lines. Usage on threads is inching up after all the initial hoopla died off. At the same time, Bluesky and Mastodon (the other potential Twitter replacements), are trending down. Plus — and here’s the big one — large brands are starting to make public announcements using Threads, and those announcements are getting covered by the media.
We can spend all day arguing if this is good or bad, whether we should be trusting Meta and Zuck with yet-another part of our online lives, and all those other things, but none of it matters. The bottom line is that Twitter taught us to expect information from public brands should be delivered in certain ways, and a number of brands no longer want to use X for whatever reasons.
If those brands keep using Threads (which is what seems to be happening), then Threads will be the winner.
The only question is how big Threads becomes. Is it the dominant app, like Twitter was, or is there a dual hegemony between X and Threads (one that’s largely divided on the ideological spectrum)?
TBD!
Prediction #2: The AI craze will feel like it died down, but only because of better integration into products and people’s workflows.
The general public can only stay interested in something for so long before it moves on to something else. In another 12 months, we’ll have moved on from talking about generative AI because it won’t be the shiny new toy anymore.
But, of course, it’s not going away. AI, is going to continuously be integrated more deeply into our products, tools, and content without us necessarily realizing. For example, you’ll be reading articles with AI-generated content or looking at images that have been created/augmented using AI, and you won’t even notice or care.
Prediction #3: Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce break up
Don’t @ me.
Prediction #4: Immersive media (AR/VR) will continue to be a relatively niche field.
I know Apple is jumping into the market with its new headset, but 2024 won’t be the year everyone starts living inside their virtual worlds. (It won’t be in 2025, either).
Usually I’d bet money on Apple being able to turn a nascent market into a goldmine, but immersive media just doesn’t make sense in the way MP3 players, smartphones, tablets, and watches all made sense.
Personally, I owned MP3 players, smartphones, tablets, and smartwatches before Apple built any of those things. In other words, even before Apple launched their versions, these kinds of tools were all providing a clear value. Apple just needed to make them better (which is what Apple is great at).
In contrast, for most people, immersive reality headsets just aren’t useful, which makes me doubt even mighty Apple’s ability to make a meaningful impact in the market.
Prediction #5: The first big domino in media consolidation finally falls
Will Amazon and HBO team up? Will Hulu get completely folded into Disney? Will Netflix ever run out of comedians to do standup comedy specials? Will Disney sell ESPN? And how many months will it take me to remember to cancel my Peacock subscription after the 2024 Olympics are over?
These are all important questions I don’t have answers to. But I do know this: I’m a relatively lazy person with a decent amount of disposable income, and even I’m getting to the point where I’m no longer too lazy to cancel.
If I’m there, I’m sure lots of other people are way ahead of me, and that can’t be great for the media industry as a whole.
Prediction #6: Social media content continues becoming more and more professionalized
Sure, the days of getting millions of followers just by posting crappy videos from your phone are already over, but it’s still possible to be a successful creator by yourself.
I’m not sure how much longer that’s going to last. The biggest social media producers are already full-on content studios (e.g. MrBeat). Soon, the medium-sized ones will be, too. Within a few years, even the smallest creators will be operating as teams of people.
It’s decentralized Hollywood!
Prediction #7: This is the year we finally all admit nobody cares about YCombinator and other top accelerators
Maybe this prediction isn’t very spicy. Maybe you already don’t care about YC. All I know is that every year I work with a handful of entrepreneurs who excitedly get accepted into YC, and, every year, those same entrepreneurs come away feeling disillusioned by the experience.
According to them, they’re treated a bit like cattle, nobody really seems to care about their individual startups, and the entire experience ends up feeling anticlimactic.
I’m not suggesting YC is going away anytime soon, but it’s not the same ticket to success it used to feel like. Instead, it’s almost more of a startup grad school. YC is where you go so you can get a job in the tech industry.
Prediction #8: Self-driving car companies take a HUGE leap toward becoming commercially viable, and by December I’ll have sold my car because I’m riding everywhere in autonomous Ubers.
Mostly just trying to manifest this one into the world. When my daughter was born, I was sure the world would have self-driving cars by the time she was old enough to drive, but she just turned eight, and we don’t seem nearly close enough.
Come on, Elon! I’ll pay you’re $10/per month for X if you can make this happen.
Prediction #9: This will be the year of social media sales prospecting
As more and more late Millennials and early Gen Z-ers work their way into buying roles within companies, we’re going to start seeing more sales prospecting take place on social media platforms. After all, younger generations are much more comfortable with someone sliding into their DMs than sending them an email, and we should expect prospecting processes to start reflecting this reality.
Prediction #10: Aaron keeps churning out great entrepreneurship content.
Fine, this wasn’t a difficult prediction, but it’s worth mentioning anyway.
When I began posting regularly Medium over four years ago, I was doing it as an experiment. At the time, I was teaching a social marketing course at Duke, and I’d run social media for companies, but I didn’t have any personal accounts. To help me learn more about personal content creation, I committed to writing two articles per week for a year.
I never imagined, by the end of that first year, I’d have 10k followers.
Since then, my Medium following has continued growing (72k!), and I’ve also expanded to TikTok, Instagram, and, yes, even, Threads. Plus, this newsletter.
In other words, thanks for your continued support. This has all been an amazing ride, and I can’t wait to share more with you in 2024.
Happy holidays, and happy New Year!
-Aaron
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