Consumer apps serve as VC-funded R&D for tech incumbents
Scott Belsky · Lessons on product sense, AI, the first mile experience, and the messy middle | Scott Belsky (Adobe) · May 18, 2023 · at 18:29
Scott Belsky explains why modern consumer apps struggle to build durable businesses compared to earlier consumer platforms.
0:00 / 0:20exact quote · 20.8s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“I think that a lot of these other more recent consumer products are just kind of clever momentary interfaces. And they are in effect at the expense of venture capitalists R and D for the platforms that already have the network effects and already have the distribution channels and the ad sales and everything else.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Scott Belsky
Scott Belsky: Early-stage users of any product are lazy, vain, and selfish
“Every customer of any type of product, I would argue, even in the enterprise, in their early stage of using the product is lazy, vain, and selfish.”
Belsky: Design will increasingly commoditize tech in the AI era
“And then in the age of AI, more and more of our choices in every industry are being made at the surface, right? And I think that's another opportunity, another argument that design will increasingly commoditize tech to some degree, and that having this designe…”
AI will collapse organizational hierarchies and eliminate specialized intermediaries
“We're entering the era where we collapse the stack in every organization, where instead of having to go to someone for anything, you can kind of do more things yourself. It's very empowering to get the answer from data as opposed to having to go to a data scie…”
Creative professionals will not be replaced by generative AI
“And some people are like, oh my gosh, creative pros are going to be replaced. No, no, no, no, they're not. They're just going to find 10 X better solutions. They're going to have that capability to explore more possibilities.”
Scott Belsky: Product teams must optimize shallow value before deep value
“You need to optimize for shallow value before you optimize for the deep value.”
Belsky: Product teams must own copy internally rather than outsource
“Believing that it effectively copies part of the product experience and needs to be born from within a product team. It's part of the overall end-to-end, and most companies are not structured that way or will even outsource copy to some degree, and that's neve…”