el producto #334 🚀
el producto #334 🚀
Figma's customer obsession, Apple to announce AR/VR headset next week, Meta back to office, BeReal chat, Network effects in Product, Amazon's mobile phone service plan & more
Hey team,
Happy weekend and welcome to a new edition of el producto!
🎰 The week in figures
$1.1T: Apple says its App Store platform generated $1.1T in developer billings and sales last year, ~90% of which was commission-free; breakdown: $910B from physical goods, $109B from in-app ads, $104B for digital goods
$1T: On Tuesday morning, Nvidia surpassed $1T market cap, joining Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft; Nvidia shares are up ~181% YTD
$194M: GetYourGuide, a Berlin-based startup operating a marketplace for travel experiences, raised $194M in funding, consisting of an $85M Series F and a revolving credit facility of $109M, valued at $2B
$175M: Hostaway, a Toronto-based startup building vacation rental management software, raised $175M led by PSG Equity; ~100K properties across 100 counties are managed through Hostaway's platform
$100M: Runway, an AI platform building a suite of generative AI tools for video, raised $100M at a $1.5B valuation; Google participated in the round
30M: Revolut, the global financial super app, has surpassed 30 million retail customers worldwide, and is now processing over 400 million transactions a month
1.7M: AI chatbot company Character.ai says it reached 1.7 million new installs within a week of launching; the mobile version went live for iOS and Android on May 23
2/3: Two-thirds of all online shopping scams now start on Facebook and Instagram
📰 What’s going on
Amazon is in talks with wireless carriers about offering a low-cost or free US-wide mobile phone service plan to Amazon Prime subscribers; the company is currently negotiating with Verizon, T-Mobile, and Dish Network to get the lowest possible wholesale price
WordPress.com will now compete with Substack and other paid newsletter platforms, as it now supports paid subscriptions and premium content; WordPress powers 43% of the web
Twitter launched Community Notes for images, which enables crowdsourced moderation of visual content, in the wake of AI-generated images getting more realistic
Meta will require all employees assigned to an office to be in-person for three days/week beginning on Sept 5
Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Meta's next mixed-reality headset, the Quest 3, priced at $499 for the 128GB model, positioning it as the first mainstream headset with high-res color mixed reality
Apple’s AR/VR headset could go into mass production as early as October for a December launch
Google announced an AI update for the Gmail mobile app that aims to make it easier to find specific emails; the machine learning-powered feature displays "top results" when conducting an inbox search
Over 350 AI leaders, including execs from OpenAI, Google's DeepMind, and Anthropic, signed a one-sentence statement, cautioning that unregulated AI could pose an existential threat, similar to pandemics and nuclear war
BeReal, a social app startup with 20M DAUs, is testing a chat feature to boost engagement; initially being tested in Ireland, the feature also includes options for private photo sharing
📚 Good reads
Want to win? Solve a boring problem. “Boring” is all about perspective, and because these problems are often overlooked in favor of the shinier ones, this creates a nice opportunity that’s less crowded and has more room to focus on the fundamentals that matter. Ben Yoskovitz argues that boring problems are often, in fact, not boring:
There’s a huge pain point, but finding it is hard (which is good)
No one else is paying attention (again, this is good)
Often the business model is easier to understand and faster to achieve (think: more B2B SaaS than B2C)
The markets are often enormous (think insurance, healthcare, and real estate)
Boring solutions are A-OK:
Tech is only useful in the context of building a company if it’s solving a real problem. You can build all kinds of state-of-the-art tech on the back of the latest white paper, but if it doesn’t help customers, does it matter?
Boring solutions are usually easier to get to market and validate. The feasibility risk is lessened, and adoption should be higher
The big boring industries are often so outdated that the solutions needed aren’t that complex or sophisticated
You can sprinkle a bit of “magic” into a boring solution and blow people’s minds. This is the perfect use case for AI—use it in a small way to simplify boring stuff and users will be amazed, especially if incumbent solutions are legacy
To make the boring…not boring…you can use The Innovation Stack which suggests that rather than creating one massive innovation, you can stack a bunch of smaller innovations to both build a moat and add differentiated value
Creating a user insights knowledge base to keep track of research findings. Interacting with users though activities like customer interviews is a critical discovery activity, but if you don’t have a way to document those insights, you can quickly lose them. This post offers a detailed case study of how one team at Digitec created a “user insights knowledge base” to ensure this information is easy to find and share
Network effects: balancing growth and sustainability in Product Management. Amy Hakobyan shares a good summary of the network effects theory in Product as seen by Andrew Chen’s book, The cold start problem
What working at Figma taught me about customer obsession. VP of Product Sho Kuwamoto on the importance of feel, service, and staying close to customers. Imagine yourself as a host, inviting your user into your application for a little bit, and wanting them to have a wonderful time
The black box, by John Cutler. Your team is burnt out. They are not getting anything done. Work is "low quality". You can see and feel those things. But what you are seeing is an output of something—the downstream effects of other things happening. In some companies this is a black box. Shining a light on the box can be overwhelming and create additional stress, but it can also lead to important insights and improvements
That’s all for today! Let me know what you think by replying back to this email or commenting on Substack
Angel