Builders Weekly | 3/3/23
Builders Weekly | 3/3/23
AI and research papers, the subscription wall, how to make your website lightning fast.
👋 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, everyone!
Another week down and all of a sudden spring is around the corner. This is the fourth installment of Builders Weekly and I think you’re going to dig what I’ve got for you today.
What I’ve got for you this week…
An AI tool that cites research papers in its answers.
What is the subscription wall and how do you avoid it?
How to make your website go FAST.
People are loving AI.
Let’s get into it.
📚 An AI tool that allows you to search research papers
I stumbled across Consensus this past week and have been enjoying asking it questions. Consensus uses AI to answer questions with findings from research papers and then links to those papers for further study. If only I had had this at my fingertips back when I had to write research papers that used academic sources…
🧱 The subscription Wall and how to avoid it
Mike Salguero, Founder and CEO of ButcherBox, wrote an excellent thread last weekend on the subscription wall and how to avoid it. The subscription wall is the point at which your churn is equal to your new customer acquisition. With these two netting out, it’s impossible to grow.
Mike outlines a few suggested ways to avoid the subscription wall:
Focus on building a great product that naturally reduces churn.
Focus on increasing average revenue per user by upselling additional product sales.
Encourage referrals.
Embrace innovation early and try new things.
I highly recommend reading the full thread.
⚡️ How to get your website to go FAST
You know when you’re on a website and it takes 5 seconds to load before you are able to actually do anything? That kills conversion rates. According to Google, a one-second site speed improvement can increase mobile conversion rates by up to 27%.
Dustin Hyle wrote a great thread this past week that outlines the tools and actions you can leverage to improve your site speed. The thread is focused on improving site speed for Wordpress sites but the concepts and tactics can be applied to most websites.
Unsurprisingly, optimizing your images and plugins has a huge impact on site speed. If you want your website to go fast, check out his thread.
🤖 People are loving AI
AI is having its moment right now, there’s no doubt about that. Hell, this could basically be an AI newsletter with how many cool AI products I have written about and will continue to write about.
I’m not the only one thinking this way; Patrick Campbell ran a test this past week and found that consumers’ willingness to pay increases 17% when AI is mentioned in the marketing copy. Quick, drop what you’re doing, sprinkle a couple of if statements into your product, and slap “AI” on your homepage!
Trends like this fade over time. In his thread, Patrick goes on to show that “Blockchain” had a similar impact in 2018 but has since faded. That said, it doesn’t mean you can’t make money with it in the short term!
That’s all I’ve got for you this week. See you all on Tuesday!
-Ben
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Love the search for cold exposure