el producto #324 🚀

ChatGPT plug-ins, Digital twins, AI tools to boost productivity, New Instagram ad formats, Microsoft launches a Notion competitor and is testing a crypto wallet, & more

Mar 26, 2023

Hey team,

Welcome to a new edition of el producto

🎰 The week in figures

+$1B: Apple is planning to spend upwards of $1B/year to produce films that will be released in theaters to build awareness for Apple TV+

$270M: Kredivo, a credit fintech for underbanked consumers in Indonesia and Vietnam, raised a $270M Series D

$250M: After canceling its SPAC last year, eToro has raised $250M at a $3.5B valuation as part of an Advanced Investment Agreement (AIA)

200M: CapCut, ByteDance’s video editing app, has more than 200M global MAUs since launching in 2020; the app grew 43% y/y in 2022, garnering more than 400M global downloads

150M: TikTok confirmed that it now has 150M MAUs in the US, up from 100M in 2020

$150M: Character.AI, a generative AI startup building chatbots of famous characters, raised $150M at a $1B valuation led by a16z

$125M: Tonal, a fitness hardware-as-a-service (HaaS) startup that was valued at $1.6B in 2021, is in talks to raise $125M at a valuation between $200M-$300M, representing an >80% markdown

$116M: Rain, a fintech startup that gives employees early access to their wages, secured $116M in fresh funding

1M: Netflix’s ad-supported tier has hit 1M MAUs after launching in November while fulfilling its forecasted deliveries to advertisers

9K: Amazon will cut 9K employees in its AWS, advertising, Twitch, and HR segments; this follows the company letting go of 18K workers between November and January; Twitch confirmed 400 layoffs

1.7K: Just Eat Takeaway is cutting 1700 couriers across the UK and is pivoting its business back to a gig economy model

40: Netflix plans to launch 40 more games in 2023; the company is currently working on 70 games with external partners and has another 16 games in development from its internal game studios

19%: According to OpenAI research, generative AI tools like Chat-GPT could impact 50% of tasks for 19% of US occupations, including financial services, retail, and healthcare

+16%: Bing has had a 16% increase in the number of users that visited the platform since it integrated GPT-4; Google's number of visitors dropped by 1% in the same period

-15%: Hindenburg Research published a short report on Block (fka Square), claiming the company has "wildly overstated" its Cash App user counts and calling the payments service a "compliance free-for-all"; Block's stock was down ~15% on the news

📰 What’s going on

OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT plug-ins, with the first bunch coming from companies like Expedia, Instacart, Zapier, Shopify, and others; currently available in alpha and through a waitlist

Adobe launched a suite of generative AI tools called “Firefly” and said its models are trained on data that is either licensed for training, in the Adobe Stock library, or out of copyright

Google is allowing select users in the US and UK to start accessing Bard, its ChatGPT competitor; Bard currently runs a “smaller, optimized version” of Google’s LaMDA

GitHub announced Copilot X, which leverages GPT-4 to offer a more personalized developer experience through chat and voice interfaces, pull request support, and answers to questions on docs

Microsoft has integrated OpenAI’s text-to-image model, DALL-E, into its Bing search engine, calling it the “Bing Image Creator”

Microsoft has started internally testing a built-in crypto wallet in its web browser Edge; screenshots shared on Twitter show wallet passwords and recovery keys embedded in Edge

Microsoft launched a preview of Loop, a Notion and Asana competitor, which allows teams to collaborate in shared docs and workspaces across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem

Microsoft is planning to launch its own mobile gaming app store for iOS and Android phones as soon as next year if its $75B Activision Blizzard acquisition is approved and the EU’s Digital Markets Act goes into effect

Duolingo is working on a music app; a job description seemingly confirms this plan, as it describes a candidate who is an “expert in music education who combines both theoretical knowledge of relevant learning science research and hands-on teaching experience;” the job listing suggests that the app will teach basic concepts in music theory using popular songs and teachers.

Instagram will launch two new ad formats: search ads and reminder ads where businesses and brands can build anticipation for upcoming events

📚 Good reads

The Age of AI has begun, by Bill Gates. “Generative AI is the most significant technological revolution since the PC and can help all humans improve their lives if the risks are appropriately handled”

How Duolingo builds product. Cem Kansu (Duolingo’s VP of Product) for Lenny’s newsletter on Duolingo’s unique team structure, steady planning cadence, design review process, OKR templates, team rituals, and more

Reaccelerate: Finding new engines of growth in your business. Des Traynon, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Intercom, recently gave a talk on how businesses should think about weathering the current economic climate, and also, how operators can actually find growth in it. Here’s a piece: What are the most important things for every function in our business to maximize the throughput for that customer type?

DO

Ensure every function blank sheets their roadmaps and only takes inputs from target customers
Adapt your entire customer funnel (sales, services, support, etc.) to ensure a world-class experience for them
Ensure all your metrics/dashboards track the success of this type of customer
Kill all activities that don’t support the strategy, even and especially the “harmless” ones

DON’T

Post-rationalise your roadmaps, e.g. “let’s finish off this project because it’ll probably help them too”
Let numerous exceptions and edge cases keep the old initiatives alive
Celebrate successes that have nothing to do with your new refined plan
Continue decisions/meetings/org charts that were predicated on the old plan

20 AI tools that will level up your productivity. Zain Kahn, The AI Guy, recently put together a neat list of AI tools on LinkedIn:

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How to become an idea machine. Greg Isenberg shares some inspiring tips and his own process for validating ideas — for both content and products

Product Leaders’ interview questions. Eugene Segal compiled a list of PM interview questions out of Lenny’s podcast, and added few actionable insights

🔮 Emerging trends

Digital twins

The concept of a "digital twin," or an accurate digital simulation of humans, is becoming a reality. Digital twins could make personalized medicine far more accurate than the current genetics-based approach:

Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield's book, Virtual You, explores the advancements made by researchers in creating accurate digital simulations of both human beings in general and specific individuals
Creating a virtual human requires collecting and analyzing enough personal data to provide a realistic representation
Digital twins will be a handy tool for advancing medical science and individuals' health
Research labs create virtual models of living cells, specific organs, and diseases
The human brain is the most difficult organ to model, but simple digital brain models already have clinical applications

That’s all for today! Let me know what you think by replying back to this email or commenting on Substack

Angel

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