“the general beliefs, ideas, and spirit of a time and place” (Merriam-Webster)
Let’s say you’ve come up with a novel app idea. Look around to see if there are other projects or trends sharing some degree of similarity with your idea. It could mean the timing is good for your project. The Hooked app was launching at around the same time as I was working on TextingStory. Hooked was the first app to sell stories in a text chat format and another app related to chat stories was a sign that I was onto something.
About a year later, TextingStory had hundreds of downloads every day. It was impressive for an app I was doing zero marketing on but not enough to generate significant revenue with a freemium model. I was then contacted by a tech journalist from Le Figaro, a major French newspaper. She was writing an article about chat stories and told me Hooked had started getting real traction with more than a million users. It was a sign for me that it was worth spending some time improving TextingStory. I worked hard on a new version and it paid off because a couple of months later TextingStory download numbers blew up. Timing is everything!