Dear friends,

In JC’s Newsletter, I share the articles, documentaries, and books I enjoyed the most in the last week, with some comments on how we relate to them at Alan. I do not endorse all the articles I share, they are up for debate. 

I’m doing it because a) I love reading, it is the way that I get most of my ideas, b) I’m already sharing those ideas with my team, and c) I would love to get your perspective on those. 

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🔎 Some topics we will cover this week

• Why platforms may be the best way to succeed in the long term.

• The cost of using intermediaries.

• How Spotify captures back value that it pays to labels.

• The future of software development - without coding skills!

• How bundling reduced churn for Disney’s streaming service.

👉 Mark Zuckerberg: “speed and strategy” (Internal Tech Emails)

❓ Why am I sharing this article?

• Why I’m so bold about building the Alan platform down the line.

• We will still need to think about what a “good” application is and how apps get distribution through Alan at some point. 

• Platform is key to our strategy because we believe that there will be a lot of different social applications and ways that people communicate and share information, and we believe we can't develop all of them ourselves. 

  • Therefore, even though it's a challenge for us to get this right, it's important for us to focus on it because the company that defines this social platform will be in the best position to offer the most good ways for people to communicate and succeed in the long term. 

  • That said, we also need to do a better job of making sure our user experience is good as we're developing this, and I think we're starting to focus more on that now.

• Right now there is a major evolution of Platform underway that will redefine what a "good" application is and how apps get distribution through our network. The basic idea here is that we want to reward apps that are trustworthy and are doing things that people want and that people are actually engaging with.

👉 Amazon's Growing Bite

❓ Why am I sharing this article?

• Why we don’t want intermediaries, because they will collect more and more, and capture the value.

• We want to be the platform because we believe we can make it better and share its value with our members.

• Amazon now collects $0.52 in revenue for every $1 spent on its platform.

👉 The App Store and the Digital Markets Act, Third-Party App Stores, Messaging Interoperability Madness (Stratechery)

❓ Why am I sharing this article?

• Very interesting change of regulation that should enable more innovation.

• Apple Inc. is preparing to allow alternative app stores on its iPhones and iPads, part of a sweeping overhaul aimed at complying with strict European Union requirements coming in 2024.

👉 Spotify’s New Home Page, Categorizing Advertising, Spotify’s Competition for Discovery (Stratechery)

❓ Why am I sharing this article?

• For me it connects to the why it will be important to build a business where a) we position ourselves as the one-stop health partner selling value, b) we leverage technology & verticalization to reduce the costs of claims with higher quality.

• However, I don’t think that Apple Music is Spotify’s most important competitor: not only is Spotify winning that fight, it is also a fight that is not a particularly profitable one to win, given that music labels take a big chunk of the winnings. 

• What continues to hold the biggest promise for Spotify in the long run is its playlist business on the music side — where Spotify can capture back some of what it pays to labels in the form of marketing — and advertising for its podcast business (and free music listening). 

• Both of these compete first and foremost with YouTube.

👉 Amjad Masad - The Future of Software Creation (Join Colossus)

❓ Why am I sharing this article?

• Programming is not only going to be for software engineers in the future

• Should we test Bounties on Replit?

• Should everybody in Alan do the Python training from Replit?

Tools from Replit:

• So you can go to ChatGPT and ask it, hey, make me a Python program that plots the chart of Bitcoin. 

  • You copy that code, and there's one place on the Internet where you can paste that code where it just works without you configuring something, and that's Replit. 

  • All the primitives that we built up are ready for this AI moment, and this AI moment where you can just talk to the computer and the computer can generate the code better than you.

• So in the future, I think we'll layer in a ChatGPT layer thing into Replit itself. 

  • And you can have conversational interface. You still have access to the code. 

  • I think it's a little while away before you're able to not worry about the code at all. 

  • But I think we're going to keep layering AI tools that help you debug, that help you explain, that help you to get to a point where I think you would have a rudimentary knowledge of code, but we will take care of the rest.

• He said that he posted a Bounty on Replit for $20. 

  • So Bounties are sort of another way to make software on Replit without actually writing code. 

  • So you just pay a bit of money, and people from our community will make the software for you. He said that the task was to create some OpenAI-based fine-tuning interface or something like that. 

  • That's like a pretty complicated task. And it got done in 48 hours, and he was like after this was done, they found out that the creator is a 14-year-old kid.

• There's a YC company that has their marketer's code on Replit to automate a lot of their marketing and their data and things like that. 

  • This idea of coding being a thing that only programmers do, I think, is just disappearing in the same way that with Figma, the concept of a designer just completely changed.

• And then go into that software and try to change it. You can subscribe to Ghostwriter. Ghostwriter is our AI tool. 

  • You can highlight any piece of code inside that software and right click, explain. You get an English explanation for that code. And then you can do right click, generate, and you can generate more code. And you can also -- inside the editor, you can get suggestions from the AI.

• Alternatively, you just go to Replit, and we have this program called 100 Days of Python, where if you commit to 20 minutes of Python per day, we'll get you to full proficiency in coding if you commit to 100 days. 

  • So just 20 minutes a day for 100 days, you could do it on your phone, and we'll get you to full proficiency. 

  • And you can use the AI tools throughout this to learn more. So I would say these 2 alternative paths, either 100 Days of Python or Bounties as a good entry point.

Strategy:

• I think we need to be a lot more iterative and reactive in this environment. I think you need to be able to change your road maps pretty quickly.

👉 An Interview with Matthew Ball About Disney, Streaming, and the Metaverse (Stratechery)

❓ Why am I sharing this article?

• Adding to the bundle can reduce churn :) 

• All of a sudden it went from $7.99 to $10.99 and that’s because they launched that other tab, that other tab was filled with House or 24 or the Walking Dead, the more adult oriented Fox properties or Disney properties. And we saw that churn actually went down in all of those foreign territories, even though ARPU went up 40%, 50%. 

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Let’s talk about this together on LinkedIn or on Twitter. Have a good week!