"Microsoft’s new Copilot AI unleashes the power of GPT-4 to Word, Excel, Teams, and Powerpoint. With this release, the rote work of writing docs, building spreadsheets, and formatting slides has become a thing of past."

"Google promptly released generative AI in Gmail, docs, sheets, & slides. You can do everything from ask for an email reply to get a proofread of your slides. Soon, every doc, model, & presentation will have help from AI."

"The latest release of the generative image AI (notably not affiliated with OpenAI) has achieved photorealism. You can have life-like photos from simple prompts like: “Person looking backwards glamor ad, commercial photography” Creative has never been easier."

"No, we’re not all going to lose our jobs. But, those who learn to use AI the best are going to excel. It’s like mobile, the internet, or computers before it. In some way, it will affect every job. You have to learn it."

"Life under an umbrella is considerably easier. Although the world around you is changing with harsh conditions, under the umbrella it’s peaceful. A great manager does the same with macro conditions. Chaos managers transfer that weather downward."

"But it doesn't have to be a complex engineering task. It’s mainly forms and content you display with conditional logic."

"So its a great place to plug in a no code tool. No code lets you skip the dev work to ship iterative experiments."

"But they aren’t features - so can be hard to get on the roadmap. A no code tool gives you the power of feedback."

"A tool like Feathery allows you to get something up without that time."

"A no code tool takes the work out of building login. You can just create the experience as a PM."

"You know those amazing magic links that Slack uses? Feathery allows you to build them into your product easily. That’s why you use a no code tool."

"There are other great no code tools in the market: Typeform, Bubble, Carrd… Just pick one up and get building. Feathery is great for login, compliance, and more advanced features when you're ready."

"To ensure backwards compatibility, Photoshop has never been able to move away from it. This makes layering collaboration on top of Photoshop nearly impossible technically."

"This is why >1/2 of Figma’s users are PMs, analysts, & folks in the product design process."

"Figma is completely free for individuals & students. This generates a huge top of the funnel. Students and solopreneurs get hooked on free Figma. Then, when they become professionals and companies, they move to paid."

"You start at the bottom end of the market. Then, you move upmarket."

"3. Building super premium tiers"

"4. Successfully launching a new product"

"5. Presenting an existential threat"

"To get to $20B on $400M ARR, Figma commanded a 50x multiple."

"Figma was able to command such a premium because it presents an existential threat to Adobe."

"After taking off in the early 2000s, revenues at Crocs declined for years. Competition in the space for work shoes and cheap knockoffs had decimated the business."

"Crocs closed 30% of its retail locations."

"Instead, Crocs doubled-down on e-commerce. This business proved to not only be much larger, but also more lucrative. Crocs went from 5 focus countries to 80+. It also increased its margins."

"2. Streamline Product Portfolio"

"Crocs reduced 30-40% of its product selection."

"People didn’t care about many of the new styles it had invented."

"3. Focus on Personalization"

"Where Crocs did take the remaining products was customization. Jibbitz, or Charms, became the focus of Crocs. These add-ons help make your Crocs “you.”"

"Crocs made new products designed by stars. The stars marketed them. It was a textbook example of product reinvention."

"5. Focus on One User Persona"

"Millennials shop online, love personalization, and are represented by figures like Post Malone."

"So, they bet on increasing brand relevancy with the already aware, instead of generating new awareness."

"Apple has built iMessage as a closed ecosystem. It brands Android users. Add one to a groupchat & they’re green."

"In 2016, Tim Cook forwarded an email to head of iPhone. It said they shouldn’t “move iMessage to Android.”"

"He called out the “data industrial complex” fueling the ad industry."

"Tight integration has allowed Apple to maintain control over the user experience. iOS engineers can tune the OS for very specific hardware. This has allowed iOS’s experience to be more seamless and less buggy than Android."

"But unlike desktop where Windows still reigns supreme, Apple was able to win with a closed ecosystem due to the app store."

"iPhone users stay iPhone users. Apple has built a rich set of software lock-in, from iCloud to Siri."

"This coincided with the recent network buildout of 5G in America. As customers looked to upgrade to 5G capable phones, they found a competitively priced Apple device."

"Let’s define Deep Product Management. This is when the PM is actively adding to the executional success of the project: removing blockers, helping make decisions that come up, being the EM's & engineers' best friend. They can speak to what's happening on a daily level."

"They pioneered PayFac technology, which allowed developers to accept payments with a few lines of code, instead of going through a lengthy list of arduous tasks: payment gateway setup, credit card storage, PCI compliance, and bank management."

"Initially it very much spread through a word of mouth process. That was surprising to us because it’s a payment system, not a social network, so it’s not something you’d think would have any virality whatsoever. But, it became clear that everything else was so bad, and so painful to work with, that people actually were selling this to their friends."

"It made something customers needed to do easy."

"They turned exceptional customer experience into a marketing strategy."

"Surely, some of Stripe’s early advisors would have advised against it, but Stripe stuck to its focused user persona."

"Lesson 2: Don’t Jump Into Big Marketing & Sales Spend"

"Braintree was building a similar product, for a similar market, with 2 years head start."

"This is one of the moments where companies define themselves. Instead of going the marketing/sales route, or the hybrid route, Stripe chose product growth as its strategy."

"Lesson 3: Build for Platforms and Marketplaces"

"Stripe built a new product for platforms."

"Where Stripe’s Payments APIs are the easiest way for typical merchants to accept payments and move money globally, Stripe Connect is those APIs for platforms and marketplaces specifically."

"A startup that helps people make money will make money itself."

"By building out payments for an e-commerce platform like Shopify, Stripe is able to access Shopify’s incredible growth."

"Stripe also has names like Lyft and WordPress on the list."

"Lesson 4: Go Deep to Solve Problems Well"

"So, for years, Stripe focused on these two products, instead of solving additional problems. It went deep, instead of getting distracted by new products."

"It takes a willingness to get your hands dirty to start examining each and every customer’s implementation of your product. Stripe does this all the way to the CEO level."

"Stripe also went deep by taking on complexity. Stripe continued to add on complexity in the back end of these products, like ML, countries, currencies. But at the same time, it continued to keep it dead simple for the developer once it reached them."

"“speed is of the essence, and a defensible trait in companies.”"

"Instead of playing zero-sum games, Stripe formalized its mission to, “increase the GDP of the internet.” This is the product vision."

"Lesson 5: Start With Startups, Move Upmarket, then Build for Everyone"

"But Stripe is building for those who do not want to focus on payments, and most startups did not."

"As the products move upmarket to the enterprise, they become long in the tooth. Eventually, they become the ones that are disrupted."

"So, to avoid this fate, Stripe’s solution is to have high standards that its single product serves the bottom and top of the market well:"

"the key learning from Stripe is: start with startups, move upmarket, then build for everyone."

"Checkout.com famously contrasts itself by focusing on the enterprise. Instead of Stripe’s million merchants, it has 1,200. But checkout.com has 13% of the company working in sales, vs Stripe’s 3%."

"Lesson 6: Launch New Products When the Time is Right"

"By early 2016, Stripe was ready to launch their first truly different product. Stripe launched Atlas, a platform that makes it easy for entrepreneurs to incorporate their business and begin accepting payments on Stripe."

"Radar is a payments optimization projection that enables fraud teams with ML from the Stripe network for 2 centers per screened transaction. That is an example of moving further upmarket to bigger companies."

"One can imagine a customer starting with Atlas, going to payments, then adding Radar as they grow. This is an arc of using Stripe to grow."

"What is particularly notable about Stripe is that both Atlas, Radar, and future products succeeded out of the gate."

"Shaping is the process of creating a rough solution to a concrete user problem — it fills the space between the broad strategy and the detailed product specification, or the PRD. This process front loads a lot of the critical thinking about what you’re planning to build and why"

"Lesson 7: Define a North Star"

"Stripe began calling itself a “Global Payments Treasury Network” (GPTN)."

"In developer speak, the GPTN is about becoming a TCP/IP for money. In layman’s speak, GPTN is about building programmable infrastructure for global money movement."

"we learn that Stripe thinks about infrastructure by analogy from AWS. What are the two big things AWS brought online? Compute & Data. Stripe has been pursuing this “AWS Strategy:”"

"Compute: Users building on Stripe want the ability to seamlessly move money around the world, with great authentication and fraud mitigation."

"Data: Users building on Stripe want to be able to put money in the cloud and hold balances in different currencies, with the ability to transmute it."

"Lesson 8: Go Offline to Enhance the Flywheel"

"In 2018, Stripe launched Stripe Terminal. Terminal is Stripe’s own version of Square’s iconic POS reader. It is a physical device to accept payments in the real world."

"Building products to help merchants offline helps them grow, which helps them buy more from Stripe."

"Lesson 9: Scale Geographically"

"Atlas is Stripe’s market testing product. Atlas is available in 140 countries. Payments are available in only 44 countries. The Generalist called this Stripe’s, “advance guard for geographical expansion.”"

"The strategy is to take a lower development product to market first, to test the size and interest."

"Packy McCormick meticulously searched for evidence of Stripe’s paid advertising by checking the most important search terms and found very few google search ads. Instead, Stripe focuses on brand, social media, and content:"

"In that sense, Stripe takes more of a Tesla approach to sales & marketing than most companies."

"Lesson 10: Iterate on Ambitious Product Strategies"

"At its heart, like Tesla, Stripe still uses product growth as its main competitive strategy."

"Tax is another way to help finance teams, by automating calculations. Identity is a whole new product. It opens up different engineering teams as potential customers, like identity or account teams."

"Stripe recently released just that. There are four key buckets of products Stripe builds, and they build on top of each other:"

"at each layer, Stripe gets more ambitious. Layer 1, its core, is payments. That is the base of everything. Then on top of that comes Layer 2, the payments optimization products: Radar and Checkout. Layer 3 is revenue operations"

"Finally, layer 4 is business solutions, which can be thought of in four buckets:"

"It also gives the product team a structure. There will be dedicated payments optimization teams who deepen the payments optimization products for customers who do not go with Stripe’s core payments solution."

"How does Stripe avoid the trap of expansion without impact? Historicity."

"Could this be a multi-decade abstraction?"

"The goal of Stripe is to change the internet forever."

"Referrals turns out to be an expensive to channel to iterate in. The touchpoints of the program are usually numerous."

"This makes any change to the program fairly developer intensive."

"How core is social to your product?"

"The best programs are not just for social products, but the reward is part of the core loop of the product. For instance, Robinhood’s stocks-based referrals program leverages the stock-trading core loop of the product."

"Can you drive outcomes that are a focus for the business?"

"Investing in referrals really sings when it aligns with a broader corporate objective like that – to drive reactivation, for instance."

"Do you have an innovative angle to bring to market?"

"As any growth marketer can tell you, early volume on a channel is always better than late volume."

"Even the best referrals channels constantly need to be rebranded with fresh rewards and schemes."

"How has your program previously performed?"

"LTV / CAC: What is the payback period for users?"

"Volume: What is the percent of new users generated by referrals (or reactivated if you are focused on that segment)?"

"For the most part, the channel is only driving 5-10% of new users. But word of mouth is the oldest channel in the books."

"In May, he published the piece Startup Economic Lessons from Shen Yun’s Empire. It includes many of the key elements that now describe Packy’s work: detailed analysis, tweet evidence, and memes & funny pictures."

"We can see that Packy keeps the detail and the memes balanced. He does not overwhelm the reader, but instead keeps them engaged. With all the funny pictures, the work is also highly shareable."

"In June, Packy worked with a growth friend. He decided to create a new domain for the site and launch on Product Hunt:"

"Packy brought the power of his existing loyal email subscriber base to bear. Asking his list to seed success on Product Hunt, the site launch ended up the 2 product of the day on the influential site for early adopters."

"In July, Packy went from newsletter writer to angel investor. When he wrote his piece on the startup Apt, Apt: The Natively Integrated Developer, he included the news."

"Packy went on to manage other people’s money rather quickly. In a mere few months, in fact."

"Packy showcased his signature style: insightful analysis on the latest tech trends in a humble, fun, and detailed way."

"Instead of going paid, like Pomp or Lenny, he decided to go the sponsorship route. He explained the reasoning in a tweet thread."

"The transparency helped his readership come along for the ride and feel like they are supporting thim."

"This also opened up an interesting article type for Packy that others do not have: the sponsored deep-dive."

"On Thursdays, he writes in-depth about a company that is a paid post. He often invests. As a result, his readers get an inside look at companies that are A) not written about a lot and B) have very little publicly available information about them. Packy also has skin in the game with the investment."

"In traditional Packy fashion, he takes his readers behind the scenes of the fundraising process in his piece, Introducing Not Boring Capital."

"Over the course of its 17-year history, Reddit has grown to become a top 10 site in the world. It is estimated to have over half a billion monthly active users."

"When they finally got to Boston, Paul explained himself further. “Don’t do mobile phones,” he said. At the time, there were no app stores. So, distribution was very tough. Instead, he suggested the duo build a web app."

"In the discussion, Paul crystallized it, “you guys need to build the front page of the web.”"

"The idea was to cross del.icio.us, with its social bookmarking features, with Slashdot, which “actually had good content,” according to Steve."

"He explained his hypothesis that it cost less to start a startup than most thought."

"In the early days, to seed content, Alexis and Steve were the top posters themselves. They built fake accounts to give users the impression the site was bigger than it was."

"A few months after launch, Steve and Alexis were soon joined by another Y Combinator graduate, Aaron Swartz. A prodigious programmer, he helped the duo accelerate feature releases."

"One of those features was comments, which was released after a contentious debate. The comments section quickly became an integral part of Reddit."

"Alexis printed out, “You are a rounding error” and pinned it on the wall."

"The talks culminated in a sale to Conde Nast just weeks after the launch of Subreddits. It was for $10M."

"Reddit had to outgrow some of the team."

"Digg seemed to be winning the war for the front page of the internet. While Digg had millions of unique monthly visitors, Reddit was still toiling below one million."

"It’s especially not easy being No. 2 as a founder in a corporate parent. In January 2009, Steve and Alexis left Reddit."

"The same month Alexis and Steve left Reddit, the Ask Me Anything Subreddit was created. It was an instant hit, with famous people participating regularly."

"1. Quarterly planning"

"In June 2018, he boldly announced the company would spend $500M to invest in growing its podcasting business."

"Just three years later, the efforts have borne fruit. Spotify just passed Apple for monthly active podcast listeners, and it is set to vastly outgrow Apple over the coming years."

"in 2003, software developer Dave Winer figured out a way to send attachments to RSS feeds for his friend Christopher Lydon."

"One person who noticed was MTV VJ Adam Curry. He decided to launch his own: the Daily Source Code, the first daily podcast. The pitch was news, on your iPod."

"Then, in 2005, podcasting got its real validation with Apple introducing the category into iTunes. Steve Jobs picked a media format."

"Steve fundamentally understood that podcasts represented the next generation of radio, because the automatic delivery of what you want gave you access to more relevant audio content."

"Apple also helped provide a central place for people to go to find podcasts."

"Although the iPhone would be released in 2007, podcasts still lived within the iTunes app."

"Podcasts get their next primetime moment in 2012, again from Apple. In June, Apple launched the podcasts app."

"One creator who read the tea leaves was Tim Ferriss."

"Podcasting has such a high reward to work ratio, that even a man who has no need to work does it."

"Then, in 2014, Serial was released. The series was the fastest to 5 million downloads in Apple’s history."

"This kicked off the era of podcasting including several highly produced shows."

"Podcasting has roughly three key elements of the value chain: creation, distribution, and monetization."

"Do the thing – create like Gimlet, the Ringer, and Parcast"

"But also to help do the thing – creator tools, like Anchor"

"And finally to distribute the thing – like Stitcher and Megaphone"

"When Spotify was founded in 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, the intention was to deal with music piracy."

"But in 2015, with over 60M users, the company added podcasts to the app."

"Valuations for podcast companies with hundreds of millions of listening hours were only in the hundreds of millions. Daniel saw this opportunity."

"At the time, the conventional wisdom was that the medium was heavily used but that the market was small, because podcasters had not figured out how to monetize the listening time comparably to terrestrial radio."

"Podcast listeners have twice the time on the platform."

"drive more podcast listening. Time on platform, engagement drives future bottom line."

"The most well-known and prominent part of Spotify’s podcasting strategy is exclusives."

"Spotify followed Gimlet a month later with a $110M acquisition of Parcast, a network of scripted true crime podcasts."

"It went big on getting content."

"His entire 11 year library went exclusive to Spotify last December."

"It has consistently focused on two product themes: fixing discovery and making user experience better."

"the company invested heavily in algorithms to recommend podcasts for you. This follows from its strategy to convert more users to podcast listening habits of power users."

"And the velocity of shipping matters — from the recent launch of interactivity and enhancements like polls and Q&A, to the release of enhanced listening features and new original programming around the world."

"And our success is not attributable to just one thing, but literally hundreds, if not thousands, of improvements that we’re working on in parallel for the benefit of creators, users and advertisers alike."

"Spotify is trying to become like Google Maps."

"One of these power user features is handling high volume."

"The company makes sure to use its product like a heavy user and figure out what the heavy user figures out. Then they build for them, instead of the massive, general audience."

"Alongside its mammoth acquisition of Gimlet in 2018, Spotify also acquired podcaster toolset Anchor for $100M."

"Indeed, Spotify makes significant investments in creator tooling. It experimented with tips and monetization long before Apple."

"Spotify’s Streaming Ad Insertion technology is the clear leader in personalization, conversion rate for advertisers, and monetization for creators."

"In November of 2020, Spotify further doubled down on distribution by purchasing podcast hosting company Megaphone. This allowed Spotify to apply its ad insertion technology into even more podcasts."

"Spotify built tools for creation, distribution, and monetization."

"By generating broader coverage across the value chain, Spotify was even able to take away the leading spot in distribution."

"Spotify views listening as an integrated experience across the two, and its app is organized to reflect that pattern of thinking."

"It seems like many of the shows are made to promote its revenue driving service, Apple TV+."

"Knowing Apple, it does not always need to be the first mover. It may just be watching Spotify’s strategy and perfecting the execution."

"the two have a legendary understanding of consumers and product strategy."

"I would push that line of thinking. I think teams should not be afraid to build in public like the Solana team, or make their intentions known like Spotify."

"In fact, double down and make a big hoopla of your intentions. This signals to investors, consumers, podcasters, and the ecosystem."

"One way to think about the podcasting app wars is that they are really about bringing together two sides of a marketplace: podcasters and podcast listeners."

"The market values companies. It does not solve problems for users"

"ByteDance was founded 15 months after Zhing watched, “The Social Network.” He was deeply moved by the story of Facebook."

"In 2016, the company built and released Douyin with a team of 8 in 200 days."

"He wanted the product to be ready for global domination, not just Chinese domination."

"1. The Legendary “Middle Platform”"

"This was particularly important for the early growth of Douyin (China’s TikTok) in the early days. In many cases, Douyin was able to leverage information from Toutiao. This helped TikTok get off to an explosive start."

"The entire ecosystem around app creation within ByteDance is a series of shared services. Video communication, basic video codec service, data platform, and other critical parts of the stack are all internally developed for competitive advantage."

"If any one thing has been the biggest driver of ByteDance’s success, its shared recommendation engine would be it."

"Copycats like Reels have to reckon with the collective user base. Meta does not centralize its recommendations across products like Instagram and Facebook the same way."

"Via the middle platform, ByteDance has taken a page out of the AWS playbook. Instead of developing technology that is only useful for one product, each service is built for the corporate parent."

"The lesson for product people is to decouple ML services."

"But abstracting services helps the company build an enterprise edge in that technology, instead of just in one product."

"TikTok has developed a unique approach to social media entertainment content. It broadcasts casually created content to a wide target audience. No one else does that."

"But TikTok’s unique position is rooted in a particularly deep insight about content."

"TikTok is playing in the long tail of casually created content."

"This content has traditionally existed outside the sphere of recommendation algorithms. That’s why it’s been so hard for YouTube, Facebook, and others to copy the ‘shorts’ format."

"The lesson for product people is that TikTok applied recommendation algorithms to data that other people did not."

"It releases a feature to improve creation of videos. This leads to a better creators experience. This drives viewers to spend more time in the app. This increases the viewer to creator conversion rate. This creates a larger and more varied content pool. This drives a better user experience for the long term."

"Notably, TikTok’s content flywheel drives its data flywheel."

"building features for creators or the provider side of a marketplace often drive multiplicative benefits on the consumer side."

"Sound Kit enables other audio creation apps to easily share music on TikTok."

"Sound Kit has helped TikTok go from consumer product to platform."

"Along with Sound Kit, TikTok also announced the launch of Login Kit. It allows users to ‘login with TikTok’ on other websites."

"Whereas the kits were products for purely technical developer partners, Jump is a “developer” feature for the everyday creator."

"This only makes TikTok more attractive to brands."

"The lesson for product people is to build out a platform on top of your core product."

"Creators often had shared with the team that they desired more time."

"Longer-form content is a much better fit for older audiences."

"Longer-form content is also lucrative."

"As TikTok makes the shift to more longer-form, it will also make the shift to more professional production."

"Dominate your own private niche first. Then slowly creep towards the part of the market where there is more competition."

"But DoorDash founders Evan Moore, Tony Xu, Stanley Tang, and Andy Fang would keep working."

"The foursome out of Stanford would drive DoorDash on an unstoppable ascent from the humble home it was renting  adjacent to the graduate student apartments at Stanford to a $50B market cap."

"This isn’t exactly the most professional-looking site, yet we kept getting phone calls; we kept getting orders. And"

"It was a classic case of founder’s insight. The young DoorDash team found product market fit because users were willing to go through hoops to get to the product."

"Would they pay $6 for it?"

"when the team dug into the numbers, they found that 85% of restaurants in America did not deliver."

"when they would do the deliveries, they would observe the stores and take notes. They ultimately identified 20 steps in the process, and, at each step, asked the five why’s, doing analysis to get to the lowest branch of what the actual problem is."

"Tony calls this “operating at the lowest level of detail.”"

"One discovery they made was that it was really hard for small businesses to know how many drivers they need."

"Every team member did deliveries and customer support for the first year."

"Ultimately, our vision is to build the local, on-demand Fedex."

"To expressly cast themselves as a logistics instead of food company that early age was very prescient."

"Half of strategy is focus, and how you cast your company is half of focus."

"The young founders recognized this at their early age and set the company to work to develop a moat around its operations and engineering functions."

"This manifests itself in numerous advantages, but one of the most important is unit economics."

"As such, the thought has always been: density matters."

"Grubub, started over a decade before DoorDash, was built on the economic foundations of the delivery business."

"But urban delivery, being an ancient business, is also brutally competitive. DoorDash decided to play a different game."

"Like my suburban Palo Alto apartment building, it would service the more suburban communities."

"It would target restaurants that did not already have a pre-existing delivery offering, because they likely had a pre-existing customer base. It would even service chains."

"This allowed DoorDash to quickly grow as it brought restaurants and areas that were not previously delivered online."

"It became a ground game like Uber in the early 2010s: how quickly can we hire drivers?"

"That same year, the company launched a subscription membership, DashPass. It has become the company’s secret weapon. By IPO, the company had 5 million active DashPass subscribers. That is a $600M a year subscription business."

"In the pandemic, Americans flooded cities. So this was terrible for the urban delivery companies. Americans ended up in suburbs, exactly where DoorDash specialized and had been bringing restaurants online for years."

"Uber and Lyft drivers became DoorDash drivers, and the company was able to grow through the pandemic at a blistering pace."

"Ultimately, restaurants that worked with DoorDash had six times better odds than an average restaurant to survive the pandemic."

"At the roadshow, the DoorDash leadership highlighted the statistic 6%: that is how much of off-premise food spending delivery represents in the United States."

"The DoorDash founders have relentlessly looked at the company and asked, “how can we organize to maximize growth?”"

"COO Christopher Payne is from ebay. CFO Prabir Adarkar, CBO Keith Yandell, and VP of Engineering Ryan Sokol are all from Uber."

"The leadership focuses the company on operating at the lowest level of detail so they can attack problems with hypothesis trees."

"This all manifests in the company value of, “truth seeking.”"

"The idea is that you come with your data and your insights, but not necessarily your opinions."

"what are the mechanisms we’re gonna build to allow speed?"

"Or take DoorDash Storefront. This product empower businesses to create their own online stores. It integrates into their pre-existing back-of-house systems to allow the merchant an easy onramp into e-commerce."

"One of the meatiest issues that is coming out of the rise of the food delivery giants is, what happens to restaurants?"

"One of the hottest issues is the listing of restaurants without their consent. It has more or less become standard practice in the industry, and DoorDash has been accused of it multiple times."

"The two are the top dogs in the new wars, to build out America’s last mile delivery infrastructure."

"“If you look at the product plan I wrote in 2000… there’s hardly any difference.”"

"Years of operating under the eBay parent had led to the brand losing much of its cultural cachet amongst tech workers."

"One afternoon, he attended an obscure financial talk at Stanford University. There were only 6 people in the room. Max was one of 5 other people listening to Peter Thiel talk that day."

"The trio created FieldLink, a digital wallet and peer to peer payment facility for PDAs. Unfortunately, there were two problems with this business. First, the market for PDAs was not large. Second, without a network of people to send and receive money, the digital wallet did not solve a core user problem."

"Do not grow a product without the right characteristics: a fit with user needs, and a sufficiently large market."

"The company shifted to a web checkout and email based digital wallet."

"PayPal launched the first (known) give $20, get $20 online consumer product referral program. This was a hype cycle technology trigger moment."

"Because of the inherently social nature of sending and receiving money, the referrals channel had perfect fit as a growth lever for the product."

"The third month, the referrals channel hit escape velocity. It began growing exponentially."

"referrals channels tuned correctly can generate exponential growth."

"At this point in PayPal’s history, we also encounter its second big (consumer) growth lever: a big merchant integration."

"Peter Thiel’s Confinity merged with Elon Musk’s X.com."

"In March 2000, with both companies hemorrhaging cash, they merged. Elon assumed the CEO role."

"In his now famous Elon fashion, things were intense inside the company. Everything moved at lightning pace."

"The company launched merchant accounts."

"It began to holistically pursue both consumer and merchant accounts."

"the merchant integration product growth strategy perhaps proved a bit “too successful” for the 4 year-old startup. July 8, less than a year after IPO, PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5B."

"Fortune Magazine published the famous piece, The PayPal Mafia. What was until that point a fact known in Silicon Valley become national news."

"During the eBay years, it is worth mentioning that the company did make some valuable and strategic acquisitions."

"Less than a year after taking the reins, Dan successfully led his third company public. On July 20th, he led the spin-off of PayPal from eBay. PayPal’s market cap immediately surpassed its parent."

"They started giving customers choice, allowing them to choose what instrument they wanted to pay with."

"This meant PayPal was going to get less per transaction, but consumer’s payment needs would be met better."

"Users have returned the goodwill in the form of higher loyalty."

"You may be able to trade-off the short-term for the long-term by putting the user first."

"Venmo is popular because it plugs into social networks. It is a social payment experience. This is the fifth critical product growth lever from the PayPal case study: unlock social."

"By making the social feed a core part of why users use Venmo, PayPal has created an engagement hook beyond the basic utility of peer-to-peer payments."

"Building out social loops and experiences like Venmo is now a tried-and-true product growth lever."

"Another critical product growth strategy that the company has been doubling down on is building two-sided network effects."

"Acquiring many merchants and consumers adds not one, but two, moats for competitors."

"The App today features social peer to peer payments, savings, stocks, pay in 4, deals & offers, and the wallet."

"This is all part of PayPal’s strategy to solve the consumer pain point that we don’t want 40-50 apps with 40-50 different passwords."

"If you do not need the best crypto access or savings account, having it in your PayPal login is valuable."

"This is the seventh product growth lesson of the PayPal case study: build new products adjacent to your main one."

"Critically, these products are within a framework that helps other products – not siloed. As long as the new growth products solve core problems for your existing users, they can help the stickiness of both groups of products."

"Compiled history of active accounts based on Google searches. Estimated where gaps."

"The market for news is dominated by a few aggregators (like Apple News), social media (like Reddit & Twitter), and publisher specific apps (Fox News, New York Times)"

"There is significant room for innovation for apps that either serve specific groups or personalize better to serve the diverse range of needs user groups have"

"The first group is customized topics; they have their areas of special interest, and they like to see news on that."

"Then, there are those who are interested in curated topics. They are open to a variety of topics and appreciate when the right one’s are curated for them."

"Third, there are people are specifically interested in local news."

"Finally, there are people who are interested in quality long-form: often distinct from the short-form, carbohydrate news that characterizes most of the press."

"They are used to reading half page columns in the New York Times and other reputable media."

"The first is a need for “content tailored to me.”"

"Perhaps that means topic-specific, alternatively that may mean curated for your reading level."

"Another need is, “the right volume for me.”"

"Another key element is “from the perspective that’s right for me.”"

"Content tailored to me"

"The right volume for me"

"From the perspective that’s right for me"

"SmartNews has 31M monthly active users spending 17 minutes a day in the app."

"In a podcast, the app’s VP of Marketing mentioned that one of its key marketing channels as low CPM TV ads on MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News."

"Accordingly, the app also has quite a political focus."

"To that end, it appears the machine learning algorithm adapts to your political preference, to address the perspective that’s right for me need, but slowly exposes diverse perspectives slightly adjacent to one’s beliefs."

"The app espouses a design philosophy putting the curated topics user first."

"Unlike most of the apps, Apple News distinguishes itself with a clear focus on audio."

"Being primarily a social media/ Internet Forum 3.0, it is the best place for niche communities and news. At the same time, then, however, it includes tons of jokes, memes, and other “less-educational” content."

"Most of the apps – aggregators and social media – monetize with ads."

"It would be interesting to see if other apps in this space adopt alternative monetization through an ad-free experience."

"Putting this all in context, news only represents about 14% of American’s daily media diets. When Americans do consume news, it is still overwhelmingly from Television."

"I expect there to probably be some apps that design particularly well for specific personas or customize based on the persona you are."

"But in such a whirlwind of growth, the company perennially planned for the next year – not the next ten."

"The way everything on the site was built into a single monolith had become too much to support development."

"As a result, an internal engineering document was created and widely circulated, “The Distributed Computing Manifesto.”"

"APIs worked to drive a smoother development environment for Merchant.com."

"The microservices architectural pattern"

"One to one database to microservice mapping"

"Enabled each team to release independently"

"Amazon made the conscious shift to become a “services company,” with a well-documented set of APIs."

"The company’s success in developing such a great option for internal teams led to the company testing the external market."

"It was targeted at affiliate marketers. The SDK (software development kit) allowed them to query extensive data about Amazon’s product catalog."

"AWS’ first feature became a rich service for media sites."

"It was the feature that started AWS, but not the feature that would grow it."

"The process of working backwards starts with a fundamental insight. Customers always want more. As Jeff puts it, “Customers are beautifully, wonderfully, dissatisfied.”"

"A Press Release – announces the product that addresses the pain point. Drafted iteratively until it’s convincing enough for the product to be truly sellable."

"An FAQ doc – a supplementary document that accompanies the PR release and answers predictable questions from internal stakeholders and potential customers."

"A visual representation of the customer experience that distills drives home an endpoint to innovate towards."

"By using Amazon.com Web Services (www.amazon.com/webservices) developers can build applications and tools that will allow them to incorporate many of the unique features of Amazon.com into their web sites — free of charge."

"Working backward is deceptively simple. But it forces clarity and helps prevent building for building’s sake (“the build trap”.)"

"At a retreat at Jeff Bezos’ house in 2003, the executive team conducted an exercise to identify their core competencies. Infrastructure as a service rated particularly highly."

"As Andy settled into the job, he pinpointed the company’s strengths in compute, storage, and databases. He also identified these as the three key building blocks for web-scale applications."

"To articulate his vision, he began calling this, “an operating system (OS) for the internet.” That would become the product vision for AWS."

"Jeff started the AWS news blog and has been writing posts almost daily. He has penned thousands of posts expanding on the concept of Amazon S3 and AWS features as lego blocks."

"The team followed up the SDK with the release of two beta services, to begin achieving the vision of a web OS: Alexa Web Information Service (AWIS) and Simple Queue Service (SQS)."

"AWS’ products, for the most part, were free beta features up until 2005. Over the course of that year, the team focused on understanding the next user cases and graduating those features from beta to full-fledged products."

"The two crown jewels of the web OS strategy, compute and storage, were offered to customers under non-disclosure agreements."

"By providing low-cost services on a usage basis, AWS could cater to everyone from the newest garage startup to large, Fortune 500 companies."

"Usage is one of the most democratic pricing models."

"In March of 2006, Amazon released Simple Storage Service (S3). It would make the type of storage that had been available to Amazon’s developers for years –  virtually infinitely scalable, cheap, and available online – available to any developer."

"Where S3 brought Amazon-style storage to any developer, EC2 brought compute that was virtually infinitely scalable, cheap, and available online."

"Essentially, EC2 Amazon allowed developers to rent virtual computers in a datacenter."

"Like S3, EC2 proved to have near-instantaneous product-market fit. As a result of the two products’ success, the company would book $21M of revenue in 2006."

"Just a few weeks after the launch of EC2 in full public beta for the US, Amazon added Europe."

"A few months later, Amazon followed up geographical expansion with another explosive product launch. The next component in the web OS, after compute and storage, was a database."

"Amazon launched Amazon SimpleDB, which used Hadoop technology atop EC2 and S3."

"The company also priced with the long-term in mind. Margins were kept razor-thin to “shut the door” on competitors."

"By 2007, developer websites were already touting AWS  as the solution to the dreaded “TechCrunch problem.”"

"Amazon was beyond Google offering a limited service in 2008. In that year, AWS was busy graduating its beta service to full launch."

"Amazon made the remarkable commitment that its compute services would be available for 99.95% of requests at any time."

"While App Engine was going after startups, EC2 was moving up through mid-sized businesses and into enterprises."

"In April, it launched Elastic MapReduce (EMR). EMR made it easier to quickly process vast amounts of data."

"Amazon followed up its huge compute and storage launches with opening its third business line: networking. In August, it launched Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)."

"VPC allowed customers to launch EC2 instances into their own isolated networks. It would prove to be a dramatic hit."

"Against the backdrop of all these product launches, finally in February 2010, came the third big player in the cloud infrastructure market: Microsoft Azure."

"The team supported hands-on integrations with two important customers in particular: Netflix (today’s market cap: $85B) and Autodesk (today’s market cap: $40B)."

"2010 would see a suite of product launches, including the Simple Notification Service (to compete with Google’s email APIs mentioned above), CloudFormation (an early example of a declarative Infrastructure as Code tool), and Route 53 (a Domain Name System accessible via API)."

"Very few walk that walk… 90% of our roadmap, and what we build, is driven by what customers tell us matters. The other 10%, we try to listen to what customers are trying to articulate, then read in between the lines, and invent on their behalf."

"The competitors at the time were mainly web hosting providers, many of whom have since exited the infrastructure as a service market."

"Instead of worrying about the weak competition, Amazon focused on being obsessed with the customer."

"Indeed, the third customer the team focused on that year was quite important: itself (the Amazon retail business)."

"The team again went deep to learn the final blockers fo the business: reliability, backups, scaling. It added features to solve those blockers, and, again, it worked."

"With all the components in place for a full cloud SaaS offering, Amazon added top-notch sales execution to its playbook between 2011 and 2015."

"But it didn’t just build for everyone. Building for everyone is building for no one."

"There’s a concept in sales of the ICP: the Ideal Customer Profile."

"Amazon’s was the 2 or 3 player in any space. They were the one’s most likely to embrace transformational IT."

"The 1 player, on the other hand, is far more likely to want to feel confidence in its current solutions and want to avoid ripping the guts of its core systems out and into Amazon’s hands."

"One of the reasons AWS turned to beefing up its sales teams so dramatically was the competition. By 2013, Azure made an appearance on Gartner’s new quadrant focused on Infrastructure as a Service."

"Not deprecating products"

"Allowing customers discounts on reservations for future use"

"Most companies deprecate older products, so they can reduce maintenance complexity. But AWS took good care of its old servers. Instead of taking them offline, it offered them to customers at cheaper costs than new machines."

"It helps the company better predict how much hardware it needs to bring online to the cloud. In that way, it helps control costs."

"In 2013, Amazon released Kinesis, for real-time processing of streaming data. This enabled analysts to look at the data as it is happening."

"These types of applications built atop AWS infrastructure have the benefit of ringing up large bills on their own, and also ringing a bigger bill in infrastructure costs."

"This generates, “the AWS New Product Flywheel.” AWSreleases new products, which enable customers to generate more business value, which creates continued increasing demand for AWS’ infrastructure products, which enables the company to fund the development of more new products. Each activity feeds the next."

"Since then, it has been tapping on AWS’ tremendous gross margins to drive operating margin that funds the rest of Amazon’s businesses."

"On the back of Microsoft landing the US Military’s $10B JEDI contract in 2019, AWS announced that they were doubling their sales staffing numbers."

"Like their product counterparts, AWS Sales teams defined success through their customers’ eyes. In"

"OBAM is very similar to the product team’s working bakwards approach."

"AWS has hired at least 66 former government officials with IT software procurement experience. This helps AWS get the leg up in procurement processes, since they know exactly how to respond."