Product Habits - How a startup loses its spark

Freemium Is an Intentional Business Strategy

Those against using freemium as a lever to grow often feel that a free tier devalues the product and attracts "junk" users. But freemium can be an effective strategy when integrated intentionally. It allows businesses to disrupt the market, de-risk product-market fit expansion, and lower customer acquisition costs. If you're incorporating a free tier into your product, understand these tactical strategies first. 

What if Generative AI Turned Out To Be a Dud?

Everyone is talking about generative AI. Company valuations are already in the billions, but the revenue isn't there yet. Generative AI has many problems to solve first to make it more reliable and valuable. While many in the tech community believe it will eventually breed a trillion-dollar industry, we should be prepared for it to take longer than anticipated.

What Makes a Strategy Great

There are plenty of strategy documents out there–from Amazon's six-pager to Salesforce's V2MOM. There's much to learn from some of these formats, but your document format doesn't ultimately decide a great strategy. It has to take on these six characteristics to be effective. Without them, you have a plan at best and wishful thinking at worst. 

Six Unconventional Ways To Ship Insanely Fast

A few years ago, Paul Graham said that the "mere rate of shipping new features is a surprisingly accurate predictor of startup success." Regular updates help a team build a certain cadence and develop flexibility and commitment to product improvement. Shipping fast is easy to talk about but harder to execute. These six unconventional strategies will help you ship and iterate more quickly.

Generative AI Success Comes Down to These UX Decisions

Building successful generative AI products may come down to building capabilities into a more powerful UX so that value to the end user is straightforward to extract. Of course, this comes with one significant tradeoff: flexibility vs. ease of use. The more clarity you have about the user's goal, the more you should lean toward ease of use. This is a thought-provoking read for anyone using generative AI in their product. 

Should LLMs Write Marketing Copy?

This article presents an interesting rule of thumb: Machines should write for machines (e.g. creating metadata), and people should write for people. You'll get the best results when writing copy by having well-qualified people make your marketing literature. Machine-written copy won't deliver the same quality–at least not yet. 

Big Advertisers Are Making the Shift to AI

Some of the world's biggest consumer packaged goods advertisers, like Nestle and Unilever, are beginning to experiment with using AI software in their advertising efforts. While the debate rages about whether content produced by generative AI models will be anything like human creativity, corporations are moving ahead with experimentation. What do you think is in store for the future of advertising?

The Inequality of A/B Testing

Microsoft just published a paper detailing the distribution of results from their A/B tests, which holds significant implications for marketers. The key takeaway is that optimal experimentation strategy depends on whether more gains accrue from typical innovations or unpredictable large successes. Here's what that means in practice.

The Art of Choosing and Testing Marketing Channels

This article was written for technical founders who have a distaste for marketing. It details how you can unlock new levels of growth by changing your thinking about marketing and identifying the proper marketing channels for your product. This is an excellent read about how you can pick your first marketing channel and how to test additional channels at the right time.