3 Product Learnings, All Things Butter, Content Creator Tools, Google & Hubspot, goss this week...

Hi folks, newsletter drop 3 🚀 (Tbh can’t believe I’ve got this far so hats off to my consistency levels peaking). Hello to all my new subscribers and to my OGs that follow me already, I appreciate every single one of you <3

So doing the whole who am I? thing for a bit longer incase you’re new here…

To be entirely transparent, I struggled with this weeks newsletter, primarily as the thing I wanted to talk about from some female founders I admire is on hold for a few more newsletters. Watch this space.

1. So what’s the product goss this week?

Yahoo is buying Artifact, an AI news app from the Instagram co-founders…

So the co-founders of the gram built an AI tool that recommends news to readers and it didn’t really take off because it couldn’t quite differentiate from other news aggregators.

The teams joining means a larger market opportunity for Artifact to scale with Yahoo having 185 million people read Yahoo News every month (I couldn’t quite believe this or think of a single person who uses Yahoo News quite honestly, if that’s you then 👀), & Yahoo is technically buying the tech and will kill Artifact as an app post acquisition.

The Tech categorises, curates & personalises content which will start to show in Yahoo news or as they call it ‘TikTok for text’. I also think this space has such an opportunity to create some sharp AI products. The most interesting thing about ideas like this exiting is timing and that very successful founders are behind this, yet it still didn’t materialise in terms of the way they can scale it. Which tells me a few things we could learn:

So 3 key learnings from building products like Artifact

• Timing to your product/feature success is everything, the right idea might be launching at the wrong time.

• It also means keep building and build again. What you might have discarded in the past might be ready for the age of AI (Wealth management will be a great example of this).

• While the likelihood of success is higher for past founders, an idea is only as good as it’s execution & truly a combination of consistency, network, doing the right thing for your product not for you & in this day and age technical expertise.

& finally, build that idea. Get a move on. Yes you.

Google to buy Hubspot (potentially), bold move imo…

So you might be asking why do they want it? Or you might be a smartypants and can see why. It’s actually pretty on par with their strategy to acquire companies adjacent to their ads business and own the entire suite (things like DoubleClick, AdMob, Channel Intelligence)

Why is it a bold move? Cause the EU are a little anti big tech. It’s also a pretty rare acquisition and it would be Googles (Alphabet) largest ever.

Google would expand in the CRM space (Customer Relationship Management, it’s a tool where your business might add details of people & sales & used for Marketing) & helped them compete better with Microsoft & Amazon.

It’s not gone ahead yet, but be interesting to see if it gets approval. My bets are off…

On the subject of Hubspot, Lenny interviewed Hubspot co-founder Dharmesh this week. His approach to public speaking is the wackiest thing I’ve ever heard, worth a listen.

2. A product I procrastinated with this week…

This week, I’ve been interested in the content creation game. A huge shout to Hamad Ali for spending time sharing his entire genius approach on social content management. An absolute inspiration.

There’s guys making butter reels on TikTok & started a butter brand making £s and here we are with 9-5 jobs that after tax equates to a few butters. I’m not saying I want to start making butter (price of butter is a joke wdym?!), but I definitely want to up my content game in line with things I enjoy.

On a complete tangent, the butter guy built this brand All things butter. He made a garlic butter video and went viral then made it into a series. He earned 1 billion views in 90 videos, started a brand & sold 100K blocks in 10 weeks. He is a Michelin trained chef, but I mean, how many of these chefs do something like this?

It’s a content creators economy & we are all just living in it.

To help me get smarter, I looked into content editing & marketing products to help me articulate my newsletter in different ways. I’m not a podcaster (never say never but do I need to bore you all to death even more with my eccentric waffling with my actual voice? Horrific.).

I decided to round up 3 apps that I think might be useful for you guys to check out if you’re thinking about similar things & my own view on the landscape which is, too many apps, none of them are actually that intuitive and it only works if you are a creative. Someone build something better, please.

What did I actually want?

I wanted an easy tool, has some templates like TikTok, tells me the style of video cuts I need to take & generates a cool reel for me.

So my 3 apps I now decided to use:

1) CapCut - It’s basically like TikTok & has TikTok reels. For now I am using this for my socials. It does brand it with CapCut but if you download the video and just crop the top, works fine. It’s not the best, but it’s probably the best out of a bad bunch tbh.

2) Canva - Always a win on the creative side. Might even be a pretty obvious tool at this point but you can also create reels on here.

3) Adobe Premier Rush - while I do not have this subscription because I’m too cheap to pay for it, I have used it in the past. Once you’re game is strong, this is probably your go too.

& let’s not forget TikTok & Instagram have their own editors which work and are decent. My issue with TikTok & data is questionable in general & tend to have a love/hate relationship.

The biggest problem imo that these products do not solve is, there are lots of people who want to be creating content because of brand or personal branding, yet aren’t creative thinkers by nature. These tools are like a set of ingredients and you’re left to your own device to make a dish, yet not everyone can cook well.

What we need is an app to help accelerate the creativity of a reel, can instruct the snippets of content needed & position the content without you having to decide how to position it. Can ‘AI’ solve it? Is there something else you think I should use? Hit me up.

3. Product gems that made me howl…

(The 61 unread gave me anxiety tbf would need to lock them in some message prison & they would never get replied too)

& finally, am I even up to anything great for your nosy?

This week I’ve been working on another random project around performance development systems. I also started reading all about the boom of AI & ERP systems so have been digging further on this & will share some fun learnings over the coming weeks.

My Flutter apps development journey is going, will add more detail soon, a little slow this week.

I setup an Instagram page & have been really working on content. Follow me here https://www.instagram.com/yastechandtea/

& that’s all folks! Please share this to a friend or to all your friends, anyone! & if you haven’t subscribed yet, then like my fave ASOS push notification for when an item is back in stock, GO GO GO! Subscribe & until next time <3…

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