el producto #413 🚀
Amazon bets on AI, ChatGPT Pro, TikTok ban moves forward, YouTube winning in podcasting, Finding strength in slowing down, AI trends & challenges for 2025 & more
Hi folks 👋
Happy weekend and welcome to a new edition of el producto
🎰 The week in figures
300M: ChatGPT now has over 300M weekly active users, CEO Sam Altman confirmed at the New York Times Dealbook Summit
4M: Revolut just reached 4M customers in Spain, an increase of 60%, or about 1.5M over the year. About the same number as it managed to attract in the first 5 years in. Now Spain ranks as the 3rd fastest growing market for Revolut, behind UK and France
$100k: Bitcoin surpassed $100,000 for the first time ever
58.78: Engagement rates on Bluesky are significantly higher than Threads or X. A piece of analysis by Sherwood shows that some links on Bluesky are getting an engagement per million user score of 58.78 vs 4.2 for Threads and 0.31for X
-40%: FinTech unicorn Stash laid off 40% of its 220-person workforce after CEO left. It was the second major layoff at Stash this year
📰 What’s going on
Alphabet-owned Waymo plans to expand its self-driving robotaxi fleet to Miami in 2025, initially deploying vehicles with human safety drivers before launching paid rides by 2026
Google Chat is taking on Slack and Microsoft Teams with a new feature called huddles that allows users to set up an instant voice / video call. Huddles is exactly the same term Slack uses
Google’s new AI can “read” emotions in photos. Google unveiled PaliGemma 2, an AI model that captions images and analyzes emotions. While this is super intriguing, the tech has raised concerns about bias and misuse in hiring and law enforcement areas. Critics argue emotions can’t reliably be inferred from facial features alone, sparking debates about the ethics of releasing it publicly
Three key members of Google's NotebookLM team have departed to launch a stealth consumer-focused AI startup led by Raiza Martin
ElevenLabs has launched its own take on Google NotebookLM which generates podcasts from PDFs, ebooks, docs or imported text. But since ElevenLabs specialises in voice generation, it has one extra capability vs. Google NotebookLM: it creates different voices tailored to your content
OpenAI announces 12 days of daily Product launches including a new o1 reasoning model and likely the Sora text-to-video tool. It is also weighing ad implementation and just added a $200/month ChatGPT Pro subscription
AWS CEO unveiled the new flagship agentic AI capabilities which allows companies to create agents that can execute tasks across a series of different systems. Users build their specialized agents on Bedrock, and then make a supervisor or orchestrator agent to help manage the other agents. AWS said the supervisor agent “handles the coordination, like breaking up and routing tasks to the right agents, giving specific agents access to the information they need to complete their work and determining what actions can be processed in parallel”
Amazon also launched a series of new AI models. They announced that Apple is using its silicon, a new service called Ultraserver that will contain 64 of its own chips — and an upcoming supercomputer cluster called “Ultracluster” that will house “hundreds of thousands of its homegrown Trainium chips”
Threads is rolling out one of its most sought after features: an updated version of search. The updated version adds a settings icon to the search bar that, when tapped, brings up “After date,” “Before date,” and “From profile” options. As Bluesky continues to grow, fast approaching over 25M users, the Product teams at Threads are battling to stay ahead with a bunch of highly requested features
Coinbase has added Apple Pay functionality which allows users to make crypto purchases using Apple Pay. This seems to be a clear signal that Apple is now happy to lend legitimacy to the crypto industry
TikTok ban moves forward. Hopes at social media giant TikTok and parent company Bytedance that its forced divesture or ban would get thrown out by the courts were partially dashed on Friday. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit “denied TikTok’s petition to overturn the law”
The Browser Company has unveiled its new browser: Dia. It’s an AI-first browser that imagines a future where the browser performs tasks on your behalf
Product research company Ballpark has released a new feature for Product teams conducting user research. Card sorting allows users to categorize topics into groups that make sense for them - ideal for scenarios where you need to re-design your information architecture
📚 Good reads
[Video] AI eats the world. The latest annual presentation by Ben Evans, this time delivered as a keynote session. Evans explores the rapid adoption and challenges of AI, giving insights on impact and usage trends. Slides version here
[Podcast] How Figma taps into taste, simplicity, and storytelling, with Yuhki Yamashita (CPO at Figma, ex-Uber, Google, Microsoft). Across each chapter of his product career, Yamashita has pulled different pages from the playbooks top companies use to build impactful products:
Microsoft: "At Microsoft, you could be the PM of the 'undo' feature of Excel. There was a culture of extreme attention to detail."
Google & Uber: At both Uber and Google, PMs were given a much broader product space, and as such had to be more comfortable making bets (and rallying folks around those bets)
Figma: The nature of Figma's product is that everything is a work in progress. It's a much more fluid way to build product
How to measure onboarding: advanced topics in activation metrics. Onboarding often feels like a side task for growth teams, but it’s not. Onboarding is nuanced, and Aakash Gupta and Ramli John have prepared a great guide to help you nail it
How YouTube ate the podcasting industry - a case study. A lot has changed for podcasting in two decades, but one shift is both underrecognized and obvious: It’s not really an audio medium anymore. It’s not hard to see why: it has discovery, recommendation and revenue - all baked into one. This piece analyses how YouTube became the global platform for video podcasts
Practicing the art of wintering - find strength in slowing down. December is a period of slowdown. Planning season takes time and code freezes delay important releases until January. But you may also notice a downshift in your energy. Anne-Laure Le Cunff explains the concept of wintering and the benefits of embracing it. “Psychologists have found that these periods of retreat, when approached mindfully, can lead to significant personal growth and enhanced resilience, and research in neuroscience shows that periods of relative quiet and withdrawal are crucial for brain health”
Rules for writing. Don’t let ChatGPT do your Product writing. Use these rules by Neal Allen and master your writing instead
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