Posts tagged "Business Models"

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Gemini 3 Proves the NVIDIA Tax Is Optional

Google trained Gemini 3 entirely on TPUs, bypassing NVIDIA's tax. The margin war between vertical integration and the CUDA ecosystem begins.

Google's Gemini 3 landed last week with impressive reviews: frontier-class performance that beats OpenAI and Anthropic except for its agentic code. Conventional wisdom said Google was lagging behind OpenAI, which remains true in adoption. But on capability, they have a real chance to catch up. The tech press is focused on benchmarks and capabilities. They're missing the real headline: Google trained these models entirely on TPUs. Zero NVIDIA dependency. While competitors debate model quality, Google...
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Why AI Platforms Are Testing User-Paid Sharing

Anthropic's Artifacts tests user-paid sharing where creators pay nothing for distribution while users burn their own credits.

Most platforms face a brutal tradeoff when enabling sharing. Charge creators for hosting and you limit adoption. Charge end-users at the point of distribution and you create friction. Subsidize usage yourself and the costs don't scale. Each path blocks something you need: viral growth, sustainable economics, or both. For years, platforms have picked their poison. SaaS tools charge creators monthly fees, killing casual sharing. Consumer apps eat infrastructure costs to drive growth, then scramble to...
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Count Dependency, Not Customers

Your competitor added 10,000 customers. You added 200 developers. Who wins? Ecosystem dependency beats user acquisition every time.

Your competitor just announced 10,000 new customers. You added 200 developers to your API program. Who wins? Traditional B2B thinking says the customer count matters most. Ecosystem thinking says dependency beats scale every time. The moat has moved For decades, B2B competitive advantage meant user acquisition. More customers, more revenue, stronger position. Simple math. That math doesn't work anymore. The $420B business SaaS market is reorganizing around a different principle: the companies that provide infrastructure...
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Two GTM Insights Product Managers Can Actually Use

Exploring a B2B GTM survey through a PM lens: two data points that might change how you think about pricing and AI features.

I've been digging through the 2025 State of B2B GTM Report from Growth Unhinged, and while most of it focuses on channel strategy and GTM execution, two findings stood out for their direct relevance to product work. These aren't prescriptions—they're observations from one dataset that might be useful as you think about your own product decisions. Your pricing tier predicts your GTM motion (not the other way around) The survey shows clear patterns between product...
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AI Platforms as the New Distribution Layer

OpenAI’s Instant Checkout turns ChatGPT into a commerce channel. Here’s what product managers need to know about AI-native distribution.

Seven hundred million people use ChatGPT every week. That’s not just a user base, that’s a distribution channel that makes traditional retail look small. With its new Instant Checkout feature, OpenAI isn’t just adding payments. It’s signaling that AI platforms are on their way to becoming full-blown storefronts. For product strategists, this marks a shift as significant as the arrival of the App Store. Distribution itself is being rebuilt inside AI platforms. From Infrastructure to...
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Rethinking Product, Market, Channel, and Model for AI Era

How Brian Balfour’s Four Fits framework has been updated for the AI era, and what product leaders can learn from the shift.

Frameworks that endure disruption are rare. Brian Balfour’s original Four Fits framework has long been a foundational lens for growth strategy. He recently released The Four Fits: A Growth Framework for the AI Era to capture how AI is shifting the constraints inside each dimension. The Four Fits have always been about scaling companies to $100M+ revenue at venture speed. To succeed, all four fits must align simultaneously. In this article, I explore the evolution...
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The Token Squeeze is Real

AI isn’t getting cheaper. Token demand is exploding, and flat-rate subscriptions are doomed. What pricing models can survive the squeeze?

AI should feel like it's getting cheaper. After all, compute costs fall, models get optimized, and every year brings new claims of a 10x drop in inference prices. But as Ethan Ding argues in Tokens Are Getting More Expensive, the opposite is true: the economics of AI subscriptions are in a squeeze. Ding’s Core Argument The paradox is simple. While yesterday’s models do get cheaper, users don’t want them. Demand instantly shifts to the latest...
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When AI Bots Rule the Web

AI crawlers dominate web traffic, but most don’t send users back. Here’s what product managers need to know about training bots, referrals, and strategy.

Most of the traffic hitting websites today is no longer human. Cloudflare’s AI Insights dashboard makes this clear: the majority of crawling comes from AI bots, and the balance of power among those bots is shifting fast. For product managers, that reality changes how we think about traffic, attribution, and strategy. !AI Insights Cloudflare Training bots dominate Close to 80% of AI crawler traffic serves training purposes. These bots pull content to feed large language...
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The Power of an Anchor - Warby Parker's Pricing Strategy

Warby Parker's playbook for product managers. Learn how the company uses pricing strategy, vertical integration, and innovation to grow.

From WSJ piece on Warby Parker: >Many things have gotten pricier in the past 15 years. Not Warby Parker's most affordable glasses, which have cost $95 since the brand’s inception in 2010. Warby Parker grew 14% last year. It did this while keeping its hero $95 price point. This shows that a focused value proposition can thrive even with inflation. The company used a few key strategies. It controlled its supply chain. It created a...
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