How Have Companies Thrived During The Economic Downturns?

Product Management, UX, Startups, and more — freshly curated by Zeda.io

Hello, all you product-loving folks! 💜

Welcome to this week's edition of Product Café, your weekly cup of coffee for everything product management, startups, and more. ☕

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Riddle of the Week 🧩

What product can you sell even if it's broken?

The answer is at the end of this newsletter.

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Is it just me or is the word "economic downturn" becoming as popular as avocado toast? 🥑

Heads up! It’s not going to be another newsletter talking about funding freezes, lay-offs and offers being rolled back. We’ve had enough of those already - you’ll feel brighter at the end of this read. We promise.🤝

We all agree that economic downturns are never pleasing to see. However, it can be an interesting time to see how companies grow during these cycles. Marty Cagan in the 2008 SVGP blog said - ‘during the major economic downturn in the late 1990s, various tech companies were impacted, some shut shop whereas some developed their product strategy to take advantage of the eventual recovery.’

Let’s see what these products did, and seek some inspiration as we say.🫡

Mailchimp

Launched in the middle of the dot-com crash in 2001 - with the simple objective to help their customers i.e. small businesses.

Now, what’s intriguing was during the 2007 great financial crisis - Mailchimp introduced monthly plans to make revenues predictable. Following which, to adapt to the recession wave they pivoted to a freemium model in 2009. That in itself skyrocketed Mailchimp’s user base from 85,000 to 450,000 in a year.

What started as a side project to provide an alternative to expensive email software, soon expanded into being one of the most loved all-in-one Marketing Platforms.

Slack

Technically, Slack (Searchable Log of All Conversations and Knowledge) didn’t launch around any of the economic downturns - but ‘Tiny Speck’ did. And, slack was a by-product for ‘Glitch’ (their gaming platform) at Tiny Speck.

The evolution of IRC (the ‘Glitch’s version) and its features was completely ad-hoc. i.e. a design spec needed to be shared - bamb the dev added it; when the team was struggling to dig into older messages - there was a search tool (which now has some really cool copies. Trust us, open your slack search bar - and you’ll be hooked), and so on.

18 months later down, Butterfield consciously and heartbreakingly shut the down glitch. And Slack (Searchable Log of All Conversations and Knowledge) was rolled out to the public in 2013.

Necessity is the mother of invention. Right?!

So there it is, two amazing products that were brewing right in the middle of the economic downturn.

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A New Entrant in the Chatbot Game: GPT4

Okay, I must admit, whenever I feel stuck in the mud of writer's block, ChatGPT has been there to give me a motivation-nudge to get started. The ChatGPT buzz is not over yet, and its creator OpenAI has something even more exciting– GPT4!

GPT4, the successor of GPT3.5, will eventually become the boss!

Wondering How ?

Unlike GPT3.5, GPT4 is multimodal, meaning it can accept both image and text inputs. This is why the possibility of GPT4 is quite high than GP3.5.

This is what OpenAI has to say about the difference between GPT3.5 and GPT4:

Capabilities

The difference comes out when the complexity of the task reaches a sufficient threshold—GPT-4 is more reliable, creative, and able to handle much more nuanced instructions than GPT-3.5.

Visual inputs

GPT-4 can accept a prompt of text and images. Over a range of domains—including documents with text and photographs, diagrams, or screenshots—GPT-4 exhibits similar capabilities as it does on text-only inputs. 

Image Source: OpenAI

Currently, they are still working on the image input part, and it is unavailable to the public.

Let’s see how GPT4 is going to unveil multiple possibilities in our professional ecosystem!😍

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What’s brewing on Zeda.io’s side?☕️

In the realm of Zeda.io, much like the quest to destroy the One Ring, we are on a journey to conquer the challenges faced by product leaders today. Identifying the most pressing issues for customers, prioritizing products, and measuring outcomes to drive business objectives are the epic battles they must face.

We are committed to crafting solutions that address these challenges. As we journey closer to achieving our goals, we shall keep you updated!😉

Until then, we invite you to partake in a riveting fireside conversation between our founder, Prashant Mahajan, and Susan Stavitzski, Senior Product Manager at Carmax as they delve into the adventurous world of product discovery.👇🏻

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That’s all folks! Have something you want to share? Put them in the comments below and we’ll get back to you soon. 

See you again soon! 💌

It’s hard to explain what a Product Manager does, we get it. But you know what’s not that hard? Sharing this newsletter with your friends and colleagues!

Answer to the riddle: Puzzle (we kind of gave away the answer already. if you know, you know)