AI Products

“And I think in the context of a human, for example, we have a really good analog of a lot of times I'm slacking back and forth with a teammate, we're sharing context, and a lot of times it's just much simpler to get on a five minute huddle with them, and just …”

“The second era of these products is clearly working with agents and, you know, primarily has been coding agents. We'd like to bring it to more, more domains, certainly like knowledge work.”

“Forward deployed engineers are necessary or newly necessary for early stage AI companies because the workflows are new. Right? If you're building a SaaS company five years ago, most SaaS products are pretty well explored, right? Like you roughly know what the …”

“Err on the side of building fewer knobs and controls, because all of those become things that you need to maintain and honor over time, and they may end up becoming irrelevant as AI capabilities advance.”

“The first discovery was actually a great one, which is AI products are easier to monetize than traditional SaaS products. The willingness to pay is just much higher, and there's a natural customer understanding that these things cost money to run, and there's …”

“Before we launched our sort of AI product, and it was more kind of esoteric and hard to use, we were in the hundreds of signups a day. As soon as we launched this AI product, it jumped into the low thousands. We're talking one or 2000 a day. But the reason we …”

“The pace at which you can get a buyer and potentially even churn is much higher, right? Because the AI products, one of the benefits of that is it is easier to build, but also I think it is easier to put it in and replace it, right?”

“I, I'm not sure that there's a land grab in AI today. Because there's a counter trend, which is that so many folks I know of who are blowing up here, who are doing five million their first month, ten million their first two months. Customer, there is budget fo…”

“To get us to move from one of our products to another, it's gotta be like twice as good. Now it's gotta be twice as good or it's not worth it, or they have to stop innovating.”

“This era of building AI products is in many ways about being first and about moving really, really fast.”

“What I've also learned about AI products and Granola is that context is extremely valuable, right? If Granola gets inside of your organization and everyone in the organization starts using it and producing and accumulating all of this amazingly rich and valuab…”

“Every single good AI product you've used is an agent loop with tools. That's it. Like there's no, you try to sort of over-engineer the harness and then do certain things, but at the end of the day, it's skills tools and a model. Like there's not really much el…”

“And then we built Trilogy and our claim to fame actually in the nineties, it was the first AI product to sell a billion dollars.”

“We're ambient, and we're always listening in the background. And I think many more AI products will go that way, but it's actually how we started.”

“I think every AI product will need, you know, they probably want to have some all you can eat, most of what you can eat, subscription with limits, and then the ability to pay for overages.”

“If you can't cross sell the new AI product to existing customers who are trying to do the same thing just with an older technology, then the cross sell acquisition and cross sell story doesn't work. This is as good as it's going to get if you're an old school …”

“I've thought for a long time that would rally because you'd have existing incumbent businesses launching AI products, and you'll see that they have data gravity and they have workflow, workflow gravity. They're a great channel to sell AI to their businesses, a…”

“Retention really matters, and if you take a look at the best AI products, you know, even if you look at M-II as the new M-I, right, because again, you're getting a lot of sort of tourists who come in at M-I, you're not paying anything for them. Month one, that…”

“When you build AI products, you really, really don't know if they're going to work. You need to have them in production, experimentation, all the time, trying to find edges, trying to find improvements in performance.”

“AI products don't look like this at all. It's actually the inverse. Building the UI is the easy part. That's the small part. The hard part is building great AI infrastructure, building products that actually truly work at scale.”

“Customers don't know how to evaluate AI products. They don't know how to run good evaluations.”

“My assumption is that every market of any reasonable size will be flooded with AI products. Maybe it already is, but my assumption is if it isn't already, it's going to be.”

“What is pretty remarkable about this moment is that there is more demand for AI and AI products than people can reasonably produce. That's the reason why there is so much investment in things.”

“The AI traffic is going to reveal something to you. You will review, reveal promising areas for new development. You will all of a sudden see very early on. Which products are gaining traction, and you should 100% copy those products. You should copy those pro…”

“We no longer sell to customers who won't buy the AI products.”

“A lot of the use cases that I saw last year were more of slap chat on your data, right? And that was, you know calling themselves an AI product. And this year, a ton of companies are really rethinking their user experiences. And their workflows and all of that…”

“You don't know how the user might behave with your product, and you also don't know how the LLM might respond to that, so you're now working with an input, output, and a process, and you don't understand all the three very well.”

“You want to make sure that that intent is rightly communicated and the right actions are taken because most of your systems are deterministic, and you want to achieve a deterministic outcome, but with non-deterministic technology, and that's where it gets a li…”

“I think that will be a huge problem once systems go mainstream. We're still so busy building AI products that we're not worried about security, but it will be such a huge problem to kind of especially with this non-deterministic API again, right? So you're kin…”

“And as you are going through this, like pain of like developing multiple approaches and then solving the problem, I feel that is like going to be the real boat as an individual. Like I like to call it like pain is the new moat, but I feel that is exactly super…”

“I'm very skeptical that the form and shape of the products that people are using today is what they're going to be using in five or 10 years.”

“I believe that even if we had no more progress today with models, which is absolutely not the case, but if, even if we had no more progress, we are way behind on product. There's so much more product to build.”

“They're actually like really hard to use because you have to like be very thoughtful about when it could help you. And if you're not prompting a model to help you, it's probably not helping you at that time. And if you think of how many times like the average …”

“Now it's like a badge of honor to have low gross margins because we're like, oh, at least people are using your AI products. You know, if we see, like we get these pitches and they're like, I have an AI thing and I got 75% gross margins. I'm like, well, no one…”

“I think the gap here that humans are solving Is translating the business rules and requirements into the underlying product. What's really interesting about all of these AI products today is they can basically do anything. You're not really limited on the capa…”

“Our claim to fame was we were the first AI product to sell a billion dollars”

“I think people believe, and I certainly believe that the next year or so of product is going to kind of establish how people use the next wave of products from, for many years.”

“In the long run, like overall, these products like might not, or probably will be doing more sort of automation or even replacement of work.”

“Dave Kahn, a partner at venture capital firm Sequoia, Estimates that the money invested in AI infrastructure in 2023 and 20 24 alone requires consumers and companies to buy roughly eight hundred billion in AI products over the life of these chips and data cent…”

“And people don't talk about it because this is their moat, right? So people are not going to go and share all of these things because it makes sense, right? If you are an email writing assistant and you're doing this and you're doing it well, you don't want so…”

“Coding agents are fundamentally very different than other AI products because the developer is the domain expert. So you can short circuit a lot of things, and also the developer is using it all day long.”

“I'm short on the entire category of like tooling around AI AI products.”

“Our nagging suspicion is that some of the year two ARR renewal rates for some of these AI products will be pretty low. In other words, that the AI product market fit is getting covered over a little bit by, you know, AI enthusiasm.”

“What's under executed today in the world of AI products is like, there's so many awesome capabilities of AI and most of them are really under merchandise and there's like very poor actually visual or otherwise metaphors or affordances given to users to help re…”

“I think it's really hard to sell any kind of AI product now without actually being fluent in The product and be able to demo the product, right? So like, you know AEs need to be like se fluent as well.”

“Our claim to fame in the nineties was we were the first AI product to sell a billion dollars.”

“Every SaaS company under the sun has launched an AI product. They're not just sitting on their hands, and you'd think that they'd have a huge advantage given distribution, but we're just seeing classic innovators dilemma.”

“I'm just shocked at their inaction and ineptitude and AI, how bad the products are from a user perspective. I mean, they're terrible.”

“This is a pattern with the, I think, where, you know, you really have to ship to understand what is even possible and what people want. Rather than being able to reason about that a priori.”

“What I tell the team about how to build AI products is you got to follow two rules. One is differentiated customer experience that we couldn't do before AI existed. Like you do something for the customer that literally we could not have done a year ago. Just, …”

“If Apple misfires on an open AI type AI product, they'll still be making hardware and it won't be existential.”

“No AI product has within app network effect. Like it's not like WhatsApp where if you build a WhatsApp rival, Meta has a definitely like a questionable brand, right? Like people don't necessarily trust Meta's products. They think like these are ad products. De…”

“One of the siren songs involved in building AI products is optimizing for the demo. We were really nervous about optimizing for the demo because with AI, it's easy to kind of take a couple of examples and put together a video where, you know, it looks like you…”

“And now we have people very happily paying 200 dollars a month and even saying in some cases that they feel like they're being undercharged for that, or they would pay more.”

“There's an initial consumer virality moment, and then that actually leads to lead generation in, Enterprise sales in a way that we did not see with the last generation of products.”

“We like translated our product into 100 something languages with new AI products.”

“The prices of these things are gonna go up. They're gonna go up just because VCs subsidize the cost of a lot of these products.”

“And like the margin for people building AI products actually goes up every, like the farther you push the Pareto frontier, the more money builders get to make, which is like such a interesting and like unique thing about this AI moment that I actually don't th…”

“Yeah, I actually, my personal take on this is I think this is a bug of this current AI moment where like the, if you look at like what is the ideal case is the models and the products like pull out what they need to from the user in order to create value for t…”

“These products, my jaw drops how cheap these products are, and they make regular B to B look like a friggin' ripoff, and so every early adopter's like, I can use Higgsfield for five bucks, I can use Winsurfer, why wouldn't I?”