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Welcome to Volume 113
We are less than three weeks away from 2023.
There’s so much uncertainty going into the new year, especially with news of more layoffs and a recession on its way.
Difficulties are bumps on your way to success. However, it can make planning for the new year tougher than usual. It can also dampen team morale and increase burnout.
That’s why you should take some time this time of the year to gather company-wide feedback to optimize processes, boost productivity, improve the culture, and drive business growth, despite the state of the economy.
Here’s what’s to come:
- Netflix takes a page out of a B2B SaaS product-led playbook
- Should Marketers worry about Generative AI?
- And more…
Let’s dive in.
🎧 Listen to the latest episode of Create Like the Greats while you work to hear Ross Simmonds break down how MasterClass built a $2.8 Billion edTech empire in 7 years.
SaaS NEWS
Netflix takes a page out of the B2B product-led playbook
The product-led approach is unique and quite effective for two reasons:
- Finding ways to get early- and continuous user feedback
- Actioning relevant feedback to improve product experience
In a nutshell, true product-led companies keep users at the center of their roadmap. That’s what makes them so successful.
Recently, Netflix took a page out of the B2B product-led playbook to improve its product experience. The streaming platform will now let tens of thousands of its subscribers give early feedback on content before rolling it out to the public.
It’s no news that Netflix has recorded a slower pace of subscriber growth this year after losing almost 1.2 million subscribers between Q1 and Q2 of 2022.
You can see from the chart how the growth difference between last year and this one isn’t as much as in other years. There’s now a lot of competition among streaming services, and Netflix has struggled.
Although things are starting to look up regarding user growth, making content accessible to users is a great acquisition and retention strategy. They can use relevant feedback to create more engaging content.
This isn’t the first time Netflix is testing content before the official launch. A small group of US subscribers previewed the movie, “Don’t look up.” Apparently, their feedback helped make the movie less serious.
According to WSJ, the movie got lukewarm reviews among critics (I hated it too, lol). However, it got nominated for four Academy awards and broke a Netflix record for weekly viewing hours of a movie.
With this new strategy, we hope Netflix rolls out more engaging content that resonates with critics and subscribers alike.
Testing content within a wider range of subscribers is a great way to go. The team can gather results from more people and compare them to identify what’s relevant.
Netflix’s strategy is similar to the product-led growth strategy Loom used to grow from 0 to 14 million users within a year and a few months.
SaaS companies can learn from these companies and steal a page from the product-led playbook. That means launching beta products or content, gathering user feedback, and iterating based on the most relevant, requested feedback.
Steal Loom’s Product-led GTM strategy
MEDIA
Should Marketers worry about Generative AI?
The internet was on fire early this week, with OpenAI’s ChatGPT rolling out a free preview for everyone to try out. Here’s an example of someone trying out the tool:
Not bad, yeah?
The natural language generation technology has left many marketers and creators conflicted. Some believe the technology is here to stay, while others are taking a wait-and-see approach. A few others believe AI can’t become just as good as humans.
Here’s what we think:
AI has disrupted lots of industries—finance, healthcare, IT, and even marketing. As a result, many have lost opportunities because they weren’t prepared. They probably heard about a substandard iteration of this technology and wrote it off. Until it became the standard.
While it’s sad to see people lose income sources, we can get ahead of the game by recognizing AI for what it could be: an ally, not a competitor or the enemy.
TikTok, for instance, has a powerful algorithm that learns from humans to make better, more personalized recommendations.
Letting prospects use ChatGPT in its infancy is a brilliant idea, in our opinion. The team and technology can learn from user feedback to improve the product and attract/retain more than 1 million users.
If OpenAI plays its card right, it could well be on its way to becoming one of the world’s most valuable companies in the future.
Bottom line? AI is the future of content.
More marketers will rely on these tools to speed up the content creation process. If we already use Hootsuite for scheduling, Ahrefs for content research, and a tool like Frase.io for creating briefs, then ChatGPT isn’t too far from the mark.
Sure, the AI isn’t so great right now. But they aren’t the first to launch a beta product. Great companies like Slack and Loom have done this in the past. And they succeeded!
That’s why marketers should start preparing to partner with the technology, rather than ignore it till it becomes unignorable.
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B2B NEWS OF THE WEEK YOU SHOULD KNOW:
🤝 Superpath acquired Help A B2B Writer for an undisclosed amount to provide more value for its community, improve the tool, and ultimately grow the business.
🚀 Mozilla invests in the metaverse with its recent Canadian startup acquisitions—the productivity tool Pulse and Active Replica, a virtual spaces and events software.
🎯 Google rolled out a continuous scroll feature for desktop search results a year after its mobile launch.
⚡️ AWS launches low-code tool for designing and building serverless applications
🏆 Discord is launching a tiered subscription plan to help creators earn money.
BRAIN FOOD OF THE WEEK:
Developers are discovering creative uses for stable diffusers beyond image generation from text prompts. Some of these use cases include:
- Editing images
- Super-resolution
- Color palette generation
- And more.
Apple recently announced the release of optimizations to Core ML for Stable Diffusion in macOS 13.1 and iOS 16.2. You can learn more about this new release and what it means here.
HIRING BRILLIANT B2B MARKETERS:
- VP of Client Services
- Director Of Strategy
- Content Marketing Strategist
- Content Marketing Specialist
TWITTER THREAD OF THE WEEK:
9 ways marketers can use research to increase the likelihood of content success by Ross Simmonds
NICE FINDS YOU SHOULD BINGE
- How MasterClass Built a $2.8 Billion EdTech Empire in 7 years by Ross Simmonds
- The Art of Social Selling by Jessica Tee O.
- The everyday digital marketer statistics and metrics for 2023 by Rock Content and Smart Bug
WHAT WE’RE WIRED INTO THIS WEEK 🎧:
Create like the Greats Podcasts by our very own Ross Simmonds
This charcuterie board of insights is brought to you by me, Jessica Tee O. ✌🏾!
