el producto #371 🚀
A guide to modern Product teams, Revolut launches eSIMs + a new crypto exchange, Slack's new AI features, Why growth models fail, Remove groupthinking & more
Hey friends,
Happy weekend and welcome to a new edition of el producto!
🎰 The week in figures
$1T: the total value of Bitcoin surpassed $1T for the first time since 2021, with overall crypto market breaking $2T in market cap fueled by investor confidence
50%: Over 50% of the apps currently in Apple’s Vision Pro visionOS App store are paid-only vs 5% of apps in the general App Store
💰 Q4 results
Alibaba: net income fell 69% in Q4. The Chinese e-commerce market is struggling with weak consumer demand. Alibaba posted revenue of $36.6B, (260.35B yuan), up 5% YoY (analysts expected 262.07B yuan). Alibaba's Chinese e-commerce platforms Taobao and Tmall, generated revenue of 129.1B yuan, up 2% YoY. The company's cloud computing unit saw revenue of 28.1B yuan, up 3% YoY. Alibaba attributed its weak performance to impairments stemming from its supermarket chain Sun Art and its Youku video-streaming service
Coinbase: reported a nearly 50% increase in Q4 net revenue to $905M, up from $605M a year earlier. It's the first time Coinbase, the largest U.S. crypto exchange by trading volume, reported a profit since Q4 2021. Coinbase attributed the growth mostly to transaction revenues, noting that subscription and service revenues stayed mostly flat. Its Q4 consumer trading revenue rose 79%, to $493M. In 2024, Coinbase plans to focus on driving revenue through core trading and the popular USDC stablecoin, among other actions
DoorDash: surpassed expectations as total delivery orders rose 23% to 574M, while the gross value of orders increased 22% to $17.6B. The top U.S. food delivery service diversifies into various sectors, such as flowers, alcohol, and groceries, expands internationally, and develops an advertising arm. Reported a 27% increase in Q4 revenue to $2.3B, slightly beating estimates. Overall MAU topped 37M, and number of MAU for subscription services like Wolt+ and DashPass increased by almost 20% to over 18M. Over 100k new merchants have joined DoorDash's marketplaces, and there are now over 150k non-restaurant vendors
Pinterest: Q4 revenue of $981M, up 12% YoY. Pinterest's revenue fell short of the $991M expected by analysts. MAU increased to 498M, up 11% YoY. Pinterest forecasts Q1 revenue of between $690M and $705M. CEO Bill Ready announced a “third-party app integration with Google
Robinhood: Q4 profit of $0.03 per share, beating the expected $0.01 loss, driven by higher interest income and increased trading activity. CFO Jason Warnick focused on "profitable growth" in 2024, citing factors like net deposit growth and increased adoption of premium services. Robinhood's net interest income climbed to $236M during the quarter from $167M the previous year. The trading of cryptocurrencies was the main driver of the 8% annual growth in transaction-based revenues, which reached $200M. The average revenue per user (ARPU) grew by 23% despite a 4% decrease in MAU, helping the company's revenue expand to $471M, above forecasts
Shopify: Q4 revenue up 24% YoY to $2.1B, above $2.08B est., and Gross Merchandise Volume up 23% YoY to $75.1B, above $71.6B est.
📰 What’s going on
Slack rolls out AI features to summarize threads, offer channel recaps, let users ask questions, and more to Enterprise users, after testing Slack AI in 2023
Google Search Labs is testing a “Talk to a Live Representative” feature, which will call businesses on users' behalf and hold until a human becomes available
Google makes Gemini 1.0 Pro and Gemini 1.0 Ultra generally available, adds support for adapter-based tuning in Vertex, and rolls out new developer tools
Mark Zuckerberg reviewed the Apple Vision Pro and compared it to Meta’s Quest 3. Zuckerberg highlighted Vision Pro’s aspects like weight, motion freedom, and input mechanisms, also unsurprisingly touted Meta's broader vision for VR—a vision that prioritizes accessibility and user experience over high-end specs. The Quest 3's advantages, as outlined by Zuckerberg, from its lighter weight to its cost-effectiveness, position it as a more accessible entry point into VR for the average consumer. He contended that the Quest 3 was not only a better value, but “a better product overall”
OpenAI unveiled Sora, its new AI system that generates high-definition videos from text prompts. Sora, the Japanese word for sky, can create realistic-looking videos up to a minute long. Sora will first launch to "a limited number of creators"
OpenAI is equipping ChatGPT with a long-term "memory" feature to remember personal details from past conversations. Users can instruct ChatGPT to remember specific details, or the bot can gradually pick up and store data about users on its own. Currently, memory is in a test phase for only a "small portion" of users and will be turned on by default
Apple is updating its Xcode programming software with AI that can generate code. The Xcode AI feature will predict and finsh segments of code, simplifying the app and software development process
Nvidia launched a free demo of a personal AI chatbot that runs locally on PCs. Called Chat with RTX, the bot can access a user's files and documents to create summaries and give answers based on that personal data. It can process sensitive data locally without accessing the internet, which should improve safety and contextual awareness
TikTok launches its native Apple Vision Pro app, offering a similar UI to the mobile apps; an executive said TikTok “redesigned the entire TikTok experience”
Amazon's artificial general intelligence (AGI) team has developed what they say is the largest text-to-speech model to date. The researchers said the BASE TTS high-fidelity model can mimic human speaker traits based on only "a few seconds of reference audio"
Revolut is launching phone plans in the UK with travel eSIMs, a rare move for a fintech, but aligned with Revolut’s strategy of a financial live without borders. Customers who have the app on their phones and pay for the £55 monthly premium plan will get 3GB of data to use globally, so that they don't lose service when moving internationally
Revolut has also announced that it will launch a new crypto exchange targeting advanced traders. The exchange will allow users to trade cryptocurrencies with lower fees and deeper market analytics than the Revolut app. Revolut has already released the beta version of the new exchange, asking its customers to test the platform through an email. The trading fees on the new exchange will range from 0% to 0.09%. Customers will be able to trade cryptocurrencies using limit orders and market orders without fees
📚 Good reads
Why growth models fail, how you can avoid this fate, and a template model to get you started. Growth models, often known as spreadsheets translating business equations, are not usually adopted broadly within companies due to various challenges. According to Dan Hockenmaier, using growth models to forecast revenue or user growth leads to unreliable results due to the compounding unpredictability from numerous assumptions. Growth models are helpful alongside other ways of understanding the business and should not be overvalued as a standalone solution
Optimizing Product team structures for modern organizational demands, a guide by Leah Tharin. Organizations must strive for team structures that empower individuals to connect their work to revenue, drive product metrics, and facilitate growth efficiently. The complexity of modern market demands necessitates a shift towards more cross-functional and flexible team structures. While each team/company has its own context and this is not a universal model, Leah proposes an insightful revision of what has become a common status quo
Generative AI, Bullshit as a Service. Alberto Romero argues that while AI has so many benefits, the main beneficiaries of the gift of AI are precisely the people who don’t respect it. At the extremes, is either a vector for a post-scarcity world or a vector of catastrophic destruction; yet, the primary use we’re giving it seems to be for the most prosaic, simplistic, and dumb stuff
How to align ML models. Google ML engineer Logan Thornloe explains why alignment is critical when building ML models and how to do it. Alignment ensures AI systems achieve desired outcomes and align with human values, goals, and ethical principles. It means the outputs of ML systems not only align with the creator’s intentions, but also that these systems are safe and reliable for users
How to remove groupthinking in meetings. The Dory / Pulse technique (developed at Coda by Shishir Mehrotra) is a great tool for equalizing voices
Why customer experience is at the core of a Product operating model. In a short and essential read, Craig Strong explains a few key tenets of product-centric organizations: owning the full customer experience, being driven by customer outcomes, and removing the obstacles to creating customer value
That’s all for this week. As usual, feel free to reach out and share your thoughts by replying back to this email or commenting on Substack
Thanks for your support!
Angel