Product-Led Growth, AI Distrust, and Product Pricing

Weekly Roundup of AI, Technology, and UX

Here’s the best from this week in product, UX, AI and technology news. As well as some product applications. Let’s go:

• ✍️ Custom Instructions

• 📈 PLG

• 🚙 Utility

• 👨‍💻 Jobs

• 🤔 AI Distrust

• 💵 Product Pricing

News and Useful Reads

ChatGPT expands its ‘custom instructions’ feature to free users

If you’ve constantly given the same instructions to ChatGPT (like what your role is or “be concise”), then you’ll be happy to know you can input that custom information once and have it remember it going forward:

OpenAI announced that it’s expanding custom instructions — a way to give users more control over how ChatGPT responds — to all users, including those on the free tier of the service. The feature, which was first unveiled in July as a beta for ChatGPT Plus subscribers, allows users to add various preferences and requirements that they want the AI chatbot to consider when responding.

Pinecone’s journey from seed to 10,000 sign-ups per day

We love to talk about product-led growth (PLG), and this post explores how Pinecone used PLG to grow its business significantly:

the traditional B2B marketing playbook didn’t land for Pinecone’s product. What was successful was scaling what had already been working – developer advocacy and enabling self-service – and hiring up the team accordingly.

The Futility of Utility

Many of us focus relentlessly on maximizing utility. Choosing the best option among all the options. Whether in life or in business or in product development. But what if that isn’t the best way to approach decisions?

We as a society (and as individuals) seem to be unable to get utility right, whether the stakes are one intern’s entertainment budget or the future of multi-billion-dollar companies. Even in the most dire of circumstances, in literal life or death situations, I’ve witnessed people’s utility maximization fail. 

Wait, ChatGPT Didn't Take My Job?

I think 8 months is too short of a time to say definitively that ChatGPT hasn’t taken your job. We’ll need more time to see the full impact of AI tools. But based on my experience consulting with companies and talking to leaders, I lean in the same direction as this article—AI will enhance what people do rather than replace us entirely.

The usual narrative may say otherwise, but the path toward AI-driven mass unemployment isn’t simple. AI technology, however impressive, is still not good enough to handle most jobs. Rather than eliminate our positions, companies would like us to simply be better at them. And firms hoping to replace humans with bots are learning that change management is hard.

Exclusive poll: Americans distrust AI giants

Are we beginning to see a broader fear of AI? As more people become aware of ChatGPT and other AI tools, it seems like more people are worried about them than excited by them.

Majorities of American voters from both parties are worried about AI risks and support federal regulation to control those risks, according to new polling by a new AI-focused think tank, the Artificial Intelligence Policy Institute, shared exclusively with Axios.

Podcasts

Getting Your Pricing Strategy Right - A Conversation with CEO Marcos Rivera

Pricing and packaging are difficult because most people and companies don’t know how to do them well. But with the right data and right strategy, we can create the right pricing and packaging for our products and the right framework to ensure we are exchanging value with our customers in the best way. Marcos and Kyle discuss pricing, strategy, and more. You won’t want to miss this excellent discussion!

Useful Tools and Resources

Impel

Our current AI tools have advanced rapidly, but they are far from what I envision for the future, which is much more seamless and fully integrated into our lives. I’m on the waitlist to try impel, but the value proposition is very intriguing: an AI that doesn’t need prompting and learns from you in order to help you.

In contrast, impel is simpler — just get it and forget it. It’ll continuously learn your workflow in the background, and instantly snap into action the moment it notices that it can help. It performs tasks, generates content, fetches codes, takes notes, sends reminders, books flights, summarises blogs, and more! The best part? You never have to ask it for anything.