Putting “??s” back in “newsletter” - what a week in Product!

Hey folks,?

What a week! And it's only Tuesday??? (at the time of writing of course...send pats on the back for?not serving you reheated leftovers here). What do?they say,?small step?for?man, one?giant leap?for Product??

Monday: Relief after a?weekend of doom post SVB Bank Run?

I bet the whole SaaS community was holding their breaths last weekend to see what happens with the deposits of?thousands?of tech companies after Silicon Valley Bank crashed in less than 48 hours.?

• Luckily, we didn't have to find out what would have happened if a significant proportion of the industry was suddenly stranded without operating capital - but we can imagine what would be the?consequences & learn some lessons:?very limited to no funds to build new features ???product teams would actually need to?escape the Build Trap?ASAP?and?focus on?the?adoption of existing features?rather than building new ones in an impossible bid to keep?feature parity?with the competitors. Not trying to talk up the SVB situation here by any means, I know it was horrible and would have had devastating consequences for the industry overall, with a lot of promising tech startups being forced to go out of business. But if I were?to find a?silver lining and a lesson for the product community here:?this could have actually led?to more mindful products, with a significantly improved onboarding experience (and UX) overall. As usual, when you have limited resources - you tend to be more selective, critical, and make a lot better choices about what to invest in. So maybe if the worst had happened - it would force PMs to be more selective too, and conduct much better discovery?P.S. If you still want to run a much better discovery process anyway - here's?a set of questions you should be asking your users.?
• very limited to no funds to drive acquisition ???marketing teams would need to focus on evergreen (and significantly cheaper)?levers: 1) SEO 2)?PLG.?Because if you had no resources to invest in ads, new content, events etc. - how would you still?drive growth??
• food for thought if your product is really a painkiller, or just a vitamin:?would it be on the list of “critical subscriptions to keep” or “nice-to-haves to cull” in such emergencies? The “critical” of course depends on the time period and the individual company’s financial situation, but how close to AWS in terms of absolute criticality are you??

Then...just as the situation had a happy ending, there was more breaking news:??

Tuesday: OpenAI's GPT-4...builds?products in seconds??????

If you watched OpenAI's?GPT-4 product announcement live stream?(if only all of us could?announce product launches?like that! ??)?your jaw probably dropped?when?it turned a hand-drawn mockup?(which is great news for people like me, with Figma skills of an average-intelligent chimpanzee)?into a functional website:?

From this...

...to this:?

It also built that discord bot?first.

Which brings me to a completely opposite conclusion from the previous point: now that building code might become significantly easier, and dev resources might become significantly cheaper, won't we be all literally?rushing to build before we even think????

Like so many products are rushed off their feet to add AI-features already (and the product community wouldn't stop talking about AI in our?2023 Product Trends survey??? read it again here).

Brian Yam pointed out the risks of this in his recent post?and?I think we should all listen:

In other news: Osano reduced their delinquent churn and support chat request volume by 25%?

If that question from point 1 ("if you had no resources to invest in ads, new content, events etc., how would you still?drive growth?)?is not letting you sleep at night, here are some ways to get your ZZZs:?

• reduce your delinquent churn and push for?expansion revenue with upgrade modals like Osano:?

• segment your users by JTBD, do cohort analysis,?and customize the in-app experiences to improve activation and reduce week-1 churn like?ClearCalcs:?

I know it's no big news, but hey, I published two case studies this week, can I get at least a slow clap????

Let me know your thoughts on the recent events.

P.S. Don't forget to sign up for our?LIVE webinar on SaaS In-App Messaging!?