Builders Weekly | 3/17/23
👋 Hey, I’m Ben! I write weekly about how to grow products and companies. I go deep on growth strategies, how to build products users love, and what actionable lessons can be learned from what best-in-class companies are doing and industry experts are saying.
Happy Friday!
Despite the US banking system’s best attempts to stop us, we made it to Friday! Welcome to the sixth installment of Builders Weekly. Here’s what we’ll dive into this week:
What I’ve got for you this week…
Break through the subscription wall
GPT4 is HERE!
Duolingo meets GPT4
In the wise words of Russell Wilson… Lets ride!
📈 Break through the subscription wall
Growing is tough and to make things tougher, all growth inevitably starts to slow at some point.
A few weeks back, I walked through Mike Salguero’s Twitter thread on the subscription wall. A friend and mentor of mine, Parsa Saljoughian, also took note of Mike’s thread and wrote an excellent article outlining the steps to calculate your growth ceiling. Parsa outlines the three ways you can raise your growth ceiling: increasing new subscribers per month, decreasing monthly churn, and increasing revenue per subscriber.
If you’re serious about learning how to build sustainable growth, I recommend reading more of Parsa’s writing.
🤯 GPT4 is HERE!
After a long wait and a million Twitter threads hypothesizing on what it can do, GPT4 has finally arrived!
This really feels like a “slowly, then all at once” scenario for AI where we all blinked and suddenly, it’s scarily easy to spin up a hyper-powerful AI tool. If you want to learn more about what GPT4 can do, check out OpenAI’s livestream recording. The clip of the demo where they took a screenshot of a light sketch and GPT4 generated a working website based on it… yeah, that blew my mind.
We’re about to see a LOT of cool stuff built in a very short period of time.
🦉 Duolingo meets GPT4
Well, I just talked about GPT4’s release and, without missing a beat, a high-profile company has already announced a premium subscription tier oriented around features that they built on GPT4.
Duolingo just announced their newest subscription tier, Duolingo Max, which is powered by GPT-4. They were granted early access to work on their offering (jealous), which allows users to roleplay conversations with Duo, their mascot, to better understand what mistakes they’re making during their lessons. We’ve talked previously about how companies would build layer 2 and layer 3 products on top of AI models and this is a great example of a killer layer 2 offering.
There is no doubt that more companies will announce similar features and offerings in the near future. The only question is, who’s next?
That’s all I’ve got for you this week, but I’ll see you soon. As always if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for something I should feature, you can reach out to me on twitter @benlkatz!
-Ben
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