Aligning Founder Superpowers with Product Cycles

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by Jacob Solomon May 23, 2023 News
Aligning Founder Superpowers with Product Cycles

As the product cycles mature, different types of builders have leverage at different times in the cycle. The biggest impact on which companies emerge as winners will be made by technologists and product pickers.

As new capabilities and product patterns emerge, technologists and product designers have a lot of leverage. Product pickers and technologists are the kings of this stage because of the rapid feedback loop between new capabilities exposed by technology and new compositions of those capabilities delivered to customers. Word of mouth is the biggest driver of customer adoption, as the underlying technology and product patterns are still not stable. Carlota Perez calls this the installation phase of a new technology when exuberance drives rapid installation and adoption of new technologies.

As the goal is to maximize market share for products that are already working, marketers have an advantage. The underlying enablers are stable and hardened, and there is a lot of competition, so the battle shifts from the feature war to a Gtm execution game. Business development and corporate development leaders have leverage as marketing patterns and markets consolidate around a few winners.

When new technologies are widely deployed throughout industry and society, they deliver the benefits more widely than in the installation phase.

Learning from other fast-growth markets

The pace of development within the space has been going on for a long time. The same dynamics played out in the early days of the Facebook Developer Platform. Within a month of launch, Social Deck had over 1 million users. We were able to achieve this by inventing and exploiting new capabilities on mobile, as well as inventing new product patterns. Knowing how to build for mobile was a competitive advantage that only a small number of technical and product-oriented founders understood, and I came to believe that having differentiated technology and products is how all great businesses are built.

Many of the same efforts fell flat when we built our second mobile company. We did invent new capabilities, but they weren't enough to drive product growth. I realized that by the year 2014, the product and platform surface for mobile had mostly stayed the same. Product- led companies like ours and Cover were out-executed by their distribution oriented competitors because of their lack of expertise in GTP and distribution.

Generative AI is in the installation phase

Engineers and technologists are highly advantaged because the underlying technology capabilities are constantly changing. On a weekly basis, they can improve customer value and experience. In recent weeks, we have seen the introduction of multi-modal input and web browsing, as well as the introduction of the ChatGPT plugins architecture, which broke an assumption that the right third-party integration point was to wrap products around The founder won't be able to keep up with the market if they can't quickly adapt to the changes.

The new product patterns are often completely different from the existing ones. It can make it appear that incumbents are in a better position than startup. We haven't asked if large language models make sense in a world of widely deployed LLMs. The GPT model wrote an email for Alice so another model could summarize it for Bob.

You can read more of my thoughts on designing products for generative artificial intelligence.

Now is the moment for programmers and product designers in generative AI

If there is a lesson to be learned, it is that founders need to carefully assess which phase a market is in and think through how that matches their powers. The ideal time to be a technical/product oriented founder is when the application architecture is unstable and the underlying platforms are rapidly evolving.

This market is likely to be dominated by these types of entrepreneurs for a long time, because the Genai platform surface is being discovered more than designed. Attempts to codify ideal use cases and user behaviors is likely to be premature because we don't fully understand what these platforms are capable of.

It is the perfect time to build if you are a developer or designer. What do you want to wait for?

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