00:47:02 · Sandy Diao
[00:47:02] S0: It's a really interesting question. I think about this one a lot. What is going to be a moat with growth? Well, here's how I view it. I think that firstly, when people ask, like, what your moat is, it's this unique competitive advantage that's supposed to sustain for the long term. But I think by definition, in the world of AI, there is going to be very few growth modes that remain the same. In fact, I think that growth modes are always constantly going to be changing depending on the size, the scale of the company, and just distribution channels themselves are changing. So by definition, you cannot have a persistent growth mode that is gonna take you from, you know, c to series a and series a to c and c plus. Right? It's just... It's not gonna work that way anymore. And one of the reasons that's true is because, again, the distribution channels are changing, things are just working a lot faster. Also, the nature of these distribution channels, like GEO or generative engine optimization, products are now being served on a platter to users. Right? Users are asking, what is this exact product that I need for my specific profile with all this context about, like, what this model understands about me? That model will just say, like, here's the thing you should use. Right? There's no more comparison. There's no more reading these lists of, like, check boxes that says, like, this solution is better than the other. There's a little bit of that and, you know, sort of referencing it. But, you know, for the most part, products are being brought closer to the point of per... Conversion with AI as one of these distribution channels. And same with video content. Right? Algorithms are getting better and better at surfacing content that is unique and custom to you, and so you don't need to do that much more research the same way that you would have been in sort of this pre AI world. And so in order to succeed here, the growth mode itself is, like, one, being adaptable and making sure that you're constantly checking on and making sure that you're aware of and changing how your distribution works. But but two, I would say that this other concept that, you know, I referenced earlier as well, finding what your natural distribution advantage is is even more important.
00:48:59 · Sandy Diao
So we need to figure out essentially for the product that we have, what are some of the unique channels that we're gonna have a leg up in? You know how when investors talk about their conversations with founders or the companies they invest in? They say, I'm looking for a founder with unfair advantages. They're basically saying, I'm looking for a founder who's gonna be better at doing this than other people. I think growth works the same way. You need to find your unfair growth advantages, which is to say, I don't wanna play the fair game of running ads like everybody else. I don't wanna play the fair game of being competitive with everyone else. You wanna say, I wanna play the unfair game of the channel in which I have a leg up. So like the Descript example that we talked about, Descript is a product that is gonna be socially shareable because its users create content. So let's lean into channels like affiliates and influencers and paid social advertising. Right? And on the other hand, if you're a b to b product, you wanna figure out what are some of the channels that you have there. A lot of business products are collaboration oriented. How do we really make the product collaborative? How do we really make invites a part of the product experience? So, you know, we really wanna lean in to start out with that. And even more so in the era of AI, lean into those early on and as hard as possible. And then, of course, adapt that strategy as time progresses because the mode itself, the distribution channels themselves are constantly evolving.
00:50:21 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:50:21] S1: I love it. And at some point, you talked a bit about b two c versus b two v, and there is actually a a third, I would say, category, which are, like, prosumers. Can you maybe elaborate on on this?
00:50:38 · Sandy Diao
[00:50:38] S0: Yeah. I think that prosumers are actually one of the most overlooked markets or segments to go after. I think there's this inclination to try to bucket companies or for companies to bucket themselves to say, like, I'm a consumer product or I'm a I'm a b two b product. But actually, a lot of the businesses, especially the successful businesses, and and especially SaaS products of the world, are are everything. Right? Prosumers are really interesting because especially for start ups, prosumers can be pretty sizable in scale, meaning that you can reach them. A prosumer, by the way, I would define as someone who has some kind of like productivity need for using your product, and it might be tied to financial outcomes. So like a content creator, maybe a indie developer, someone who has more than just like a simple hobby, but wants to do something productive with it. So that prosumer is great to go after because they have really, really high usage. They have propensity and willingness to pay, and they can essentially help you build into this eventual motion to go after some kind of more productive use case around, you know, b to b or enterprise. And b to prosumer, I think, is actually a lot of businesses out there and a lot of reason why, even LLMs have been successful in monetizing as well. You know? That casual GPT user who's using GPT or Gemini for search and just basic question and answer is probably not gonna pay. But a user who's doing a little bit more with it, like trying to do more deep research or automate some of their workflows or even use it for a bit of their work as well is most likely gonna swipe their credit card and become a paying customer. And so I think b to prosumer is actually a great early segment to go after and figuring out what is that consumer like use case that I can go after, but has more of that, you know, productivity business propensity. One of the other benefits of beta prosumer is that it's a really great fit for being talked about. So word-of-mouth tends to be a really great fit for prosumer products because, again, like, tied to things that you do, really easy to explain. You can have tutorial content. You have a lot of creators talk about it on social channels, and arguably one of the fastest and growing channels out there, is social short form video content.
00:52:50 · Sandy Diao, Guillaume Moubeche
So, yeah, being a prosumer is a is a great segment to go after, and I and I think it's actually a combination of consumer businesses who are kind of evolving, going a little bit more upmarket, as well as enterprise b two b products who want to have bigger land grab reach more customers, but maybe don't necessarily know how to do that yet. [00:53:10] S1: Yeah. I agree. And I also fit from a branding perspective. You can do a lot of very interesting things, you know, when it comes to prosumers, because you can have the brand of a pure consumer product that's targeted at people who are generating revenue, as you said, or might generate revenue or or add productivity to to what they use, and at the same time, you know, like, revenue and scale that you would not usually get with b two c because people are less inclined to to purchase, like, software than what... When they they are... Or they run a business.
00:53:10 · Guillaume Moubeche, Sandy Diao
[00:53:10] S1: Yeah. I agree. And I also fit from a branding perspective. You can do a lot of very interesting things, you know, when it comes to prosumers, because you can have the brand of a pure consumer product that's targeted at people who are generating revenue, as you said, or might generate revenue or or add productivity to to what they use, and at the same time, you know, like, revenue and scale that you would not usually get with b two c because people are less inclined to to purchase, like, software than what... When they they are... Or they run a business. [00:53:47] S0: Yeah. Exactly. Like, a great example is one of the companies I work with is Adobe. And, you know, a lot of their early business was essentially consumers. Right? It was, you know, individuals who are using Adobe tools for design. But over time, they evolved... They used that to evolve into this sort of prosumer lane, where you had productive individuals who were... You know, maybe their full time job or their job itself was being a, you know, content freelancer. They worked in an agency. They worked in a small, medium sized business. And then that kind of gave them the ability to enter enterprises and and teams and more of that b to b segment. So, yeah, exactly what you said. [00:54:25] S1: No. That's cool. And I know we're almost running out of time, so I'm I'm curious. Like, what's what's the project that excites you the most at the moment?