What a week for Product!  â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â Hey folks, What a week! And it's only Tuesday ð
(at the time of writing of course...send pats on the back for not serving you reheated leftovers here). What do they say, small step for man, one giant leap for Product? Monday: Relief after a weekend of doom post SVB Bank RunÂ
[Image]I bet the whole SaaS community was holding their breaths last weekend to see what happens with the deposits of thousands of tech companies after Silicon Valley Bank crashed in less than 48 hours. Luckily, we didn't have to find out what would have happened if a significant proportion of the industry was suddenly stranded without operating capital - but we can imagine what would be the consequences & learn some lessons:Â
- very limited to no funds to build new features â¡ï¸ product teams would actually need to [escape the Build Trap]( ASAP and focus on the [adoption of existing features]( rather than building new ones in an impossible bid to keep[feature parity]( with the competitors. Not trying to talk up the SVB situation here by any means, I know it was horrible and would have had devastating consequences for the industry overall, with a lot of promising tech startups being forced to go out of business. But if I were to find a silver lining and a lesson for the product community here: this could have actually led to more mindful products, with a significantly improved onboarding experience (and UX) overall. As usual, when you have limited resources - you tend to be more selective, critical, and make a lot better choices about what to invest in. So maybe if the worst had happened - it would force PMs to be more selective too, and conduct much better discovery P.S. If you still want to run a much better discovery process anyway - here's [a set of questions you should be asking your users](.Â
- very limited to no funds to drive acquisition â¡ï¸ marketing teams would need to focus on evergreen (and significantly cheaper) levers: 1) SEO 2) [PLG.](Because if you had no resources to invest in ads, new content, events etc. - how would you still drive growth?Â
- food for thought if your product is really a painkiller, or just a vitamin: would it be on the list of âcritical subscriptions to keepâ or ânice-to-haves to cullâ in such emergencies? The âcriticalâ of course depends on the time period and the individual companyâs financial situation, but how close to AWS in terms of absolute criticality are you?Â
Then...just as the situation had a happy ending, there was more breaking news:Â
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Tuesday: OpenAI's GPT-4...builds products in seconds ð¤¯Â ð± If you watched OpenAI's [GPT-4 product announcement live stream]( (if only all of us could [announce product launches]( like that! ð) your jaw probably dropped when it turned a hand-drawn mockup (which is great news for people like me, with Figma skills of an average-intelligent chimpanzee) into a functional website: From this...
[Image]( ...to this: [Image] It also built that discord bot first. Which brings me to a completely opposite conclusion from the previous point: now that building code might become significantly easier, and dev resources might become significantly cheaper, won't we be all literally rushing to build before we even think? ð¬ Like so many products are rushed off their feet to add AI-features already (and the product community wouldn't stop talking about AI in our [2023 Product Trends survey ð read it again here]().
 [Brian Yam pointed out the risks of this in his recent post]( and I think we should all listen: [Image] In other news: Osano reduced their delinquent churn and support chat request volume by 25%Â
If that question from point 1 ("if you had no resources to invest in ads, new content, events etc., how would you still drive growth?) is not letting you sleep at night, here are some ways to get your ZZZs:Â
- reduce your delinquent churn and push for [expansion revenue with upgrade modals like Osano](:Â
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- [segment your users by JTBD](, do cohort analysis, and customize the in-app experiences to improve activation and reduce week-1 churn like [ClearCalcs](: [Image] I know it's no big news, but hey, I published two case studies this week, can I get at least a slow clap? ð
Let me know your thoughts on the recent events. P.S. Don't forget to sign up for our [LIVE webinar on SaaS In-App Messaging](! [Image](
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Emilia Korczynska, Head of Marketing at UserpilotÂ
I'm a marketing manager obsessed with product growth. Wanna talk? Simply respond to this email! To make sure you keep getting these emails, please add emilia@userpilot.co to your address book or whitelist us. Want out of the loop? Don't remember you subscribed at all? We get it. We sometimes don't remember how we got to our office today let alone how we subscribed to this or that email. Sometimes people also get offended by our strong opinions on all matters product, SaaS and UX, but you know what? We won't stop sharing them - and what we believe is the best product practices and the future of SaaS. Anyway, if you ever want to come back you'll know where to find us. Until then! [Unsubscribe](. Our postal address: 1887 Whitney Mesa Dr #9995 Henderson, Nevada 89014 United States