el producto #382 🚀
Making sense of customer feedback, Big tech Q2 results, AI funding growth, ChatGPT Memory, The Startup Canvas, Roadmap mistakes, How Monzo does research, Effective stakeholder management & more
Hey friends,
Happy weekend and welcome to a new edition of el producto!
🎰 The week in figures
$12.2B: The predicted slowdown in AI didn’t happen after all. Funding to AI startups increased in Q1 2024 vs Q4 2023 with $12.2B invested
$1.1B: CoreWeave finalized a $1.1B funding round that values the AI cloud provider at around $19B. That's up from its $7B valuation in a secondary share sale in December
$250M: Health tech startup Innovaccer to raise $250M funding from investors. Innovaccer aims for a valuation between $2.5B to $3B. The nine-year-old health tech startup aggregates patient data from disparate systems and electronic health records systems
226M: Snap’s usage outside of the US and Europe is exploding with 226M users
$175M: Enterprise browser startup Island secured $175M Series D. The Dallas-based startup doubled its valuation to $3B, up from $1.5B less than six months ago when it raised a $100M Series C round
$169M: LA-based wealth management startup Altruist, whose software and app help with trading and more, raised a $169M Series E led by Iconiq at a $1.5B valuation
1.2M: Meta’s open-sourced LLM Llama 3 had 1.2 million downloads in its first week
💸 Q1 results
Amazon: Earnings and revenue exceeded expectations, with revenue reaching $143.3B (vs expected $142.5B). Cost-cutting measures, fulfillment operations optimizations, and cloud spending stabilization have driven the company's earnings growth. AWS revenue reached $25B, exceeding the forecast of $24.5B.. Advertising revenue surged by 24%, hitting $11.8B, slightly above the projected $11.7B. Operating income skyrocketed by over 200% to $15.3B, with AWS accounting for 62% of total operating profit. Net income surged to $10.4B, more than tripling from the previous year's $3.17B
Apple: Despite a 4% decline in overall sales and a 10% drop in iPhone sales, Apple exceeded estimates with earnings per share of $1.53 and revenue of $90.75B.Mac revenue hit $7.5B, exceeding the predicted $6.86B, while iPhone revenue reached $45.96B, a little less than the projected $46.00B. Revenue from other products decreased by 10% to $7.9B, while iPad revenue fell by 17% to $5.6B. Positively impacted by subscription services and licensing agreements, the Services division had a 14.2% increase in sales to $23.9B
PayPal: 9% increase in revenue to $7.7B for Q1. PayPal’s transaction margin declined to 45.0%, compared to 47.1% in Q1 2023 and 45.8% in Q4 2023. PayPal’s international TPV is up 17% YoY on a FX-neutral basis, international revenue is up 14% YoY on a FX-neutral basis
📰 What’s going on
Google is laying off its Python engineering team responsible for Flutter and Dart
Google Phone app beta rolls out “Audio Emoji”, letting callers select an emoji to play animated sound effects: clapping, laughing, party, crying
Instagram updates its recommendation algorithms to promote original content, impacting aggregator accounts, and increase distribution for smaller accounts
Apple is expected to unveil an iPad Pro with an M4 chip at an eventon May 7. Apple will market the new iPad Pro as "its first truly AI-powered device."
Tim Cook says half of the Fortune 100 companies have purchased Apple Vision Pro units
Apple has hired AI specialists from Google and set up a low-profile AI lab in Switzerland. Apple has expanded its AI team by poaching experts from Amazon, Meta, Netflix, and especially Google
AI startup Anthropic launched an iPhone app for its chatbot Claude. The free offering competes with the iOS version of OpenAI's ChatGPT
Snap announces Snapchat users can edit messages within five minutes of sending them, “coming soon” to Snapchat+ subscribers “first”, map reactions, and more
Instant delivery startup Getir is exiting the U.S., U.K., and European markets to focus solely on its home market of Turkey. The move will impact at least 6,000 jobs across the closing markets. In addition to the closures, the company is raising a new investment round to extend its runway and double down on its home market
LinkedIn debuted three puzzle games on the web for mobile and PC users. The free games are designed to connect users and are available on the LinkedIn Games site. The games include Pinpoint, a word association game; Queens, a logic game blending Sudoku and Minesweeper; and Crossclimb, a trivia game arranging four-letter words in order. Companies have been launching games to replicate the success of The New York Times, which acquired Wordle in 2022. A LinkedIn director said the company's mission is to "connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful." Not so sure about the productive part
Calendly revamps its browser extension as it seeks to do more than schedule meetings
Stripe announced that crypto payments would return to the platform after a 6 year hiatus last week. The company is now accepting USDC stablecoins, with support currently limited to Solana, Ethereum, and Polygon networks
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has made its AI assistant "Q" generally available to businesses and developers. The chatbot answers employee questions based on a company's data and workflows
OpenAI has confirmed the rollout of ChatGPT’s Memory feature that will allow users to store queries, prompts, and other customizations. It is available to all paying subscribers outside Europe and Korea
Loom has released new features which could come in handy for product teams. The new features will automatically edit your videos and allow users to quickly transform videos into documents
Twitch is the latest company to roll out a new ‘discovery’ feed to drive engagement. The new feed will launch across Twitch’s iOS and Android apps and allows viewers to scroll through bite-sized bits of content to discover new streamers. The feed will also contain ads - but these will be skippable, too
📚 Good reads
Startup Canvas: Product strategy and a business model for a new Product. Pawel Huryn shares key questions to ask, a recommended approach, and an editable template of the Startup Canvas to download. Pawel’s Startup Canvas is a great forcing function to sit down and think about hard questions. And at the end of the day, asking the right questions is what will get you building the right product
7 fails of roadmap-making, by Leah Tharin. The most common potholes to avoid when creating long term plans. When it comes to roadmaps, the process itself is often more valuable than the end result. Just going through the ordeal of gathering the relevant stakeholders will reveal misalignment and help everyone to sync up. Every time you disagree and find a compromise, you learn something. This whole process will make your team and your whole organization better at working together
How Monzo does user research. Rosie Hoggmascall reverse-engineered the opportunity to participate in a Monzo’s user research to explain how one of the first challenger banks thinks about research
Do you want to win arguments or solve problems? An insightful piece on effective stakeholder management by Ant Murphy. We are often said that big part of Product Management is “saying No,” and while that may be true, the bigger true is that stakeholders (putting personal interests aside) tend to be on your same boat. You are both trying to solve customer problems and to make the same business win. “My distaste for Stakeholder Management early in my career made me view stakeholders as adversaries that I had to challenge and say ‘no’ to rather than partners to collaborate with. The best advice I got was to treat stakeholders like your users. To build empathy with them”
How Perplexity builds product. Lenny Rachistky interviewes Johnny Ho, the co-founder of one of the AI startups of the moment. It’s always inspiring to see how a successful fast-growing startup has to figure out things as they go, and what is making the different from others from the start
Organizing and making sense of customer feedback. Adam Fishman shares the thoughts from leaders at Reforge, Chime, SpotHero, Quizlet, Slack, Gojek and more. Classic techniques and gradual AI integrations that can aid in the transition towards enhanced customer-centric strategies
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