Posts tagged "Monetization"

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AI Platforms as the New Distribution Layer

4 min read

OpenAI’s Instant Checkout turns ChatGPT into a commerce channel. Here’s what product managers need to know about AI-native distribution.

Seven hundred million people use ChatGPT every week. That’s not just a user base, that’s a distribution channel that makes traditional retail look small. With its new Instant Checkout feature, OpenAI isn’t just adding payments. It’s signaling that AI platforms are on their way to becoming full-blown storefronts. For product strategists, this marks a shift as significant as the arrival of the App Store. Distribution itself is being rebuilt inside AI platforms. From Infrastructure to...
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Rethinking Product, Market, Channel, and Model for AI Era

6 min read

How Brian Balfour’s Four Fits framework has been updated for the AI era, and what product leaders can learn from the shift.

Frameworks that endure disruption are rare. Brian Balfour’s original Four Fits framework has long been a foundational lens for growth strategy. He recently released The Four Fits: A Growth Framework for the AI Era to capture how AI is shifting the constraints inside each dimension. The Four Fits have always been about scaling companies to $100M+ revenue at venture speed. To succeed, all four fits must align simultaneously. In this article, I explore the evolution...
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The Token Squeeze is Real

3 min read

AI isn’t getting cheaper. Token demand is exploding, and flat-rate subscriptions are doomed. What pricing models can survive the squeeze?

AI should feel like it's getting cheaper. After all, compute costs fall, models get optimized, and every year brings new claims of a 10x drop in inference prices. But as Ethan Ding argues in Tokens Are Getting More Expensive, the opposite is true: the economics of AI subscriptions are in a squeeze. Ding’s Core Argument The paradox is simple. While yesterday’s models do get cheaper, users don’t want them. Demand instantly shifts to the latest...
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When AI Bots Rule the Web

2 min read

AI crawlers dominate web traffic, but most don’t send users back. Here’s what product managers need to know about training bots, referrals, and strategy.

Most of the traffic hitting websites today is no longer human. Cloudflare’s AI Insights dashboard makes this clear: the majority of crawling comes from AI bots, and the balance of power among those bots is shifting fast. For product managers, that reality changes how we think about traffic, attribution, and strategy. !AI Insights Cloudflare Training bots dominate Close to 80% of AI crawler traffic serves training purposes. These bots pull content to feed large language...
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