This Secret Pattern Predicts What’s Next in Your Market. Once You See It, You Can’t Unsee It.

Want to spot opportunities before anyone else does?

Want to know the future of your industry, anticipate major shifts in consumer behavior, or just prepare for the next phase of your own life?

The closest you may ever get is learning to recognize this simple pattern:

Everything bundles, unbundles, and rebundles.

As editor in chief of Entrepreneur, I have met thousands of entrepreneurs and studied hundreds of companies. This is the stickiest, most compelling pattern I’ve ever come across. I think about it a lot, and it’s helped me make sense of major changes in my own work, as well as across industries. After reading this essay, I suspect you’ll think a lot about it too.

Here’s the story of when I first encountered it. It happened in 2024, as I interviewed Notion cofounder and CEO Ivan Zhao for this magazine.

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The $11 billion re-bundler

Notion is a workplace productivity tool where you can create anything — to-do lists, sales trackers, collaborative docs, presentations, etc. It’s like Google Docs, Excel, PowerPoint, a calendar, and more, all rolled into one. This is something people really want: Notion has 100 million-plus users and an $11 billion valuation.

But Zhao told me that, despite its complexity, his business is very simple: “Notion is in the bundling business,” he said.

He says he often thinks about the opening line of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a historical novel about the rise and fall of Chinese empires. It starts with this line: “The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.”

In other words: Everything unbundles and rebundles forever. Opportunity comes by spotting when that shift is taking place. That’s all Zhao did with Notion, he says. He started by thinking about the history of workplace productivity tools:

First, bundle: Everyone used Microsoft in the 1990s. A bundle of Word, Excel, and so on.

Unbundle: When cloud computing began, people left Microsoft’s bundle. Businesses started cobbling together more customized apps (Trello, Google Docs, etc.) for their own workflows.

Re-bundle: Now, people are overwhelmed by options. Zhao recognized this, and built Notion to put everything back in one place. Simplicity is the selling point.

In other words: Thus it has ever been.

Related: The Future of Work Is Flexible and Fractional — But It’s Still Failing. Here’s How to Fix It.

Another bundle in action

A few months after meeting Zhao, I was listening to the podcast Search Engine. It ran an episode called ​“How Do We Survive the Media Apocalypse?”​ in which New York Times columnist Ezra Klein diagnosed why the newspaper industry fell apart. He said it all had to do with bundles.

Before the internet, Klein said, newspapers were bundles — containing news, sports, recipes, classifieds, movie listings, and more. Consumers might have only wanted one part of that, but they had to buy (and therefore fund) the whole thing.

Then the internet unbundled those topics. People went to separate places for their sports and recipes and job listings. That left newspapers to primarily sell the news — which is expensive to produce, hard to sell ads against, and not what many of its prior readers wanted anyway.

Despite the deteriorating business model of the media industry as a whole, The New York Times is a financially healthy company. How? In part, it’s because it has rebuilt the bundle — with games, food, sports, podcasts, and events. In the past few years, based on data from the company, people have spent more time in its Games app than they do in its News app!

In other words: The New York Times was a bundle. It was unbundled, then re-bundled.

Now let’s go a step further.

As I mentioned, I’m the editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine. A company like ours used to have traditional competitors like Inc., Fortune, Forbes, and so on.

But today, all traditional media companies are also competing against creators — individual people who have huge audiences and influence. As a result, sponsors’ marketing dollars are also shifting toward creators.

People often ask me: Where does this go next? And once I saw this through the lens of bundling/unbundling, I realized: Oh, this is just a version of the same thing.

Related: How the Next Generation of Entrepreneurs Is Outpacing Us — and Why

Here’s How It Works

First, the bundle: People used to trust a media brand. That brand bundled many individual voices (i.e., you subscribe to Time, and Time publishes the writers you know).

Now, the unbundle: Creators can reach audiences directly, so they don’t need established brands. Audiences love this, because they can feel a direct personal connection to that creator.

Next, the re-bundle: As creators seek scale, they’ll start media companies — where they’ll promote and monetize other creators’ work. It will be like a network, with these creators sharing audiences and collaborating on content. Eventually, the main creator will get tired and step back, leaving a brand name with its new bundle of creators. At that point, the creator economy will have literally become the traditional media model it is currently challenging.

You can see this playing out right now with Steven Bartlett, who became famous for his The Diary of a CEO podcast. He started a company that, in part, now launches other creators’ podcasts—and it recently closed a funding round at a $425 million valuation.

If Bartlett plays this right, the name “Bartlett” could become the same as “Forbes” or “Bloomberg” — a name that represents a bundle. 

In fact, I once ​shared that thought on LinkedIn,​ and guess who left a comment: It was Steven Bartlett.

He wrote: (add emojis?) Bartlett. 

I suspect Bartlett is thinking the same thing.

Related: AI Is Creating New Winners and Losers. Here’s How Smart Leaders Are Restructuring to Get Ahead.

Why this cycle never stops

In the earliest days of internet browsers, there were lots of questions about how that industry would evolve. Would browsers be separate businesses? Would manufacturers like Microsoft create their own browsers for Windows? 

In the midst of all this, Netscape Communications then-president and CEO Jim Barksdale gave some advice that became business lore. He said: “There are only two ways I know of to make money: bundling and unbundling.”

There’s a reason this pattern repeats endlessly. Both bundling and unbundling solve real problems, but they also create new problems.

Bundles are convenient and efficient, but they force you to pay for things you don’t want. Unbundling gives you choice and specialization, but it creates complexity and decision fatigue.

So we swing back and forth. When bundles become too bloated or expensive, we unbundle. When unbundled options become too fragmented or overwhelming, we re-bundle.

And I’d argue that this principle doesn’t just pertain to business.

We bundle our lives.We bring groups of friends together, then realize we’d rather see them alone (until another group opportunity comes along). Or our partners become our everything—our social life, our thought partner, our whatever — and then we realize it’s also healthy to find some of these things in others.

We bundle our identities. Our identity gets tied up in our job title, our achievements, and our social circle. As we grow older, growth often means picking these things apart, investing more or less in certain parts of our lives, until we create a new bundle of identity.

We bundle our careers. We start by taking on everything. (“Sure, I’ll do marketing, ops, and sales.”) Then we focus deeply on one thing and become a specialist. Then we become leaders who must bring together multiple disciplines.

It’ll always change. Always unbundling and re-bundling. And once you see the pattern, you can appreciate that nothing is permanent — and that all changes follow the same logic. No direction is set forever. No path is straight and linear. “New things” are just new versions of old things.

Are things changing? Go with it. Do you want to make a change? Go for it. Feeling left behind by a change? Watch closely, because opportunity will loop back around.

We live in a cycle. And it’s ours to shape and ride.

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