"Everyone's always complaining SEO is dead. It can't grow. Word of mouth is so hard. All of the ingredients for new distribution platform are essentially happening. My prediction the new distribution p..."

"company, you place multiple bets. For startups, it's a totally different ballgame. You have to choose one and go all in. Think about companies like Zinga that grew on Facebook and then became massive ..."

"centered most likely around Chat GBT. It is really rare for a new growth channel to open up. It's been a long time since the last one appeared. And the people who recognize this and hop on it early ar..."

"recommend you listen to this full conversation and discuss the ramifications with your team. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTu..."

"you Brian Balffor. Today's episode is brought to you by DX, the developer intelligence platform designed by leading researchers. To thrive in the AI era, organizations need to adapt quickly. But many ..."

"Okay, excellent foreshadowing. Uh I completely agree. If it's anything, it would be chat GPT at this point. Let's get into it. What are the what are the cycles that uh platforms generally follow? Yeah..."

"that's step zero step one is then um these players somebody essentially identifies whatever the moat is the thing that is going to help build them defensibility and help them hit escape velocity and b..."

"like they close it down by doing one of two by one of a few things. They either shut it down entirely, two, they develop their own firstparty applications to absorb the the highest use cases, or three..."

"they went to third party developers and they said okay we've created this canvas and they used to call it the canvas and they were like you could put anything in the canvas that you want an app a game..."

"right? If if we go through it, right? So just before you get other examples, just something I'll highlight here. One is the mode they identified in theory was the friend graph. I imagine just like onc..."

"the you just need to know how to play the game. That that's competition. That's business. They're playing you. So you need to play them. like that like that that might be a little a little sadistic or..."

"amount of time to play the game. Okay. And the big aha here is yes, this will end maybe not great for you, but there's this magical period when they're open to customers and users where you can grow l..."

"can even see this with like chat GPT as an example right uh they just launched these like deep research connectors um one of them was my former company HubSpot and you know if you sat inside HubSpot a..."

"that. Cool. So what you're saying is not only is there going to be this big opportunity to grow. If you don't take advantage of it, somebody in your space will. So it's not only there's an opportunity..."

"So, look like like let's go through this cycle. We right now we're in that competitive environment like we said like all those players we talked about chatbt Claude Gemini all these folks they're they..."

"one of those another one of those loops. And so if you look at who's farthest on this, it definitely is um chat GPT, right? Like they were kind of the first ones to memory. They've been investing a lo..."

"see the effects of of memory and and they have the very elusive smile curve, right? The ones that you just like and the only other times I've seen, you know, all of those dynamics very few times in my..."

"we're going to go through the steps of we're going to go through the steps of the cycle and you can already see this right like uh you know they're starting to form preferred partnerships right with u..."

"prediction is on chat GPT. And um in in the blog post that I wrote about this, I actually then played my own devil's advocate and said, "Okay, here are some reasons why it might not be a chat chat GPT..."

"the distribution points of search and Chrome and Android and and those types of pieces. But um and a lot of people point to them, but my experience with all of their products is uh like going back to ..."

"actually doing super well just in a different use case. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned this because this brings up something that uh we skipped which is uh there are smaller platforms that have existed ..."

"play in for um some some products. Um there's all sorts of it feels like everybody has the same strategy at this point as everybody wants to launch an agent platform. I imagine some of these other hor..."

"right now. Also love cloud. So I think what so the key point here you're making is that there's almost a number of distribution channels emerging many of them will be niche. So I think of LinkedIn if ..."

"and come into and then you have like whole all like the disruption theory kind of playing out as well. And so um obviously depends on like the infrastructure cost and compute costs to to to run these ..."

"when the opportunity appears and what do you predict as of the day we're recording? What do you predict will be the next couple things that open that chatbt and let's just focus on that releases to st..."

"um successfully and there's two reasons for this right users struggle with horizontal tools they can do everything and that's exactly why they struggle to adopt and so they typically need more specifi..."

"that's one version of it. Um the other version of it is just like the replacement to search. Um there will probably be uh you can also see them starting to make more moves here which is uh like deeper..."

"next the next steps that we'll see now that's what I think for JTPT I think the thing that we should talk about is like um essentially what I would advise folks especially startups is you're placing b..."

"winner, right? So like that's just right like you you had to have iOS as part of your betting strategy in order to win. So everybody right now like you're probably at the cycle and trying to figure ou..."

"I love this analogy. Okay. So just to be crystal clear about what listeners should do, what founders should do, product team should do. The advice here essentially is uh integrate with and chat GPT, m..."

"headlines are scaring us about all the ways that AI is coming for our jobs creating a lot of anxiety and fear. But a recent survey from Miro tells a different story. 76% of people believe that AI can ..."

"That's mirror.comlenny. So you were head of growth at at HubSpot for a long time. So and you gave that as an example, HubSpot. Why would they integrate? Why would they give away all their data so that..."

"for them. So going back to that amazing quote that you shared at the beginning of the conversation by I think it was Alex Rampaul. Yeah. Of that startups win by finding a distribution channel before t..."

"The when I started when you entered, it felt too late. Yes. It always feels too late, I think, to people that join like Silicon Valley or sorry, Mark Andre has this famous quote. He's like, I came to ..."

"platform. What would your advice be for them to decide where to where to place their bets? Yeah. So I think this is a great question because once again, you know, put my personal prediction aside for ..."

"they giving you to incentivize you to develop on their platform and uh and like all these platforms are a bit of a it's a bit of a game of whoever understands the rules and how to arbitrage the rules ..."

"Yeah. To use that euphemism. Yeah. Um so say someone is sitting there today. Is there anything they can do to start making a bet? Is it simply creating an MCP that allows LMS to suck in your data? Is ..."

"So that's kind of been our our journey. And so we've seen inside companies that are going through this transformation from two perspectives. One is obviously selling in that tools, but the other persp..."

"think the most impactful thing um that you can do is form really hard constraints So what what you there there's other parts is like okay you want to communicate this you want to establish an owner of..."

"hardest decision is going to come down to exiting people. So in every transformation what we see is essentially three groups of folks. You see your uh we call them the catalysts the people kind of lea..."

"completely different culture. Cultures thrive on density, right? And that's why they're sometimes the best ones feel like cults, you know? Um and and so as a result from that perspective it's like hey..."

"tons of executives. The story we hear from the end users, the PMs, the ine all that kind of stuff that we talked to kind of using all this stuff. One of the main questions we ask them is uh you know i..."

"the road. Yeah. Oh my god. Okay, Brian, is there anything else before we get to a very exciting? That's it. Let's do lightning rounds. Yeah. Ding, ding, ding. All right, Brian, I've got five questions..."

"Let's do it. Okay. What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people? My my god honest answer is that I have not had time to finish an entire book since I had my sec..."

"give one more shout out to a different podcast which is from uh uh from two guys at Spark Capital. Nibil Hyatt, which I know from my early Boston days, and uh Frasier, I'm sorry, I'm blanking on the l..."

"there. Yeah, they're talking about rewards and creating behavior change. Yeah, exactly. And the reason to do it is his whole thing is you want to get to low resting heart rate and that helps lower you..."

"show. I've been seeing that on my Apple TV. Maybe I should check it out. Good tip. Do you have a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love? It could be a gadget. It could be a a..."

"tip. And the and the current monitor. Very cool. Okay, two more questions. Do you have a life motto that you often come back to and find useful in work or in life? Something you share with folks, some..."

"Final question. Brian, you don't know this, but your parenting advice on Adam Fisherman's podcast really impacted my parenting philosophy, specifically this line you had about independence. Oh, and I'..."

"Thank you for sharing that. I know I didn't tell you that I was going to ask you about this. So that was a beautiful way. Yeah, I didn't know where I I couldn't remember that whole podcast, so I had n..."

"place. But uh those are the two major pieces. Last but not least is that um as I mentioned Ped Mosavat uh who I used to work with, he used to Slack, we just have we have this fun podcast. The two of u..."