Drop the A
As I've written before, venture capital loves a good answer to 'Why now?'
It's obvious that AI provides a good answer to 'Why now?' on a macro level for consumer tech broadly. One of the key sub-drivers of that is the ability to create true personalisation. This is a theme we've been thinking about for a while, but the best phrasing of it - "from persona to person" - crystallised for me when I was listening to this Invest Like the Best episode with the founders of Ladder, the health and fitness app.
To cut a long story short, the founders talk about the original vision of Ladder: personalised workout programmes for each individual user, delivered digitally. The original thesis was that true personalisation unlocked material incremental value for the end-user, and the ability to deliver the content digitally meant it could de-couple from the physical locations required for high-quality training in person.
But the reality of that model pre-AI was extremely difficult, at least if the ambition is to build a scalable venture-backable business - and it was. It simply didn't work to have a human writing plans for each individual, even if the content was delivered digitally. It captured one of the key benefits of technology (low marginal cost to distribute) but missed out on the other (low marginal cost to produce).
Happily, the founders didn't sit on their hands and complain the world is unfair. Through furious consumer feedback gathering, they figured out that whilst personalisation might be the theoretical "best case", a close second is a product catering to personae i.e. groups of customers with similar, if not identical, needs. Programming for larger cohorts unlocked the scalability that Ladder needed to build towards its $100m ARR scale today.
Post-AI, though, the original vision comes back into view as a plausible route for the next generation of the product. Generative AI has the potential to create dynamic content on the fly, customised to the remaining idiosyncrasies of a given user. Think of it as the perfect puzzle piece to fit the user's puzzle-piece-shaped need, rather than a rough estimate that you have to push and jam at the edges to get into the right place.
At least in theory, Ladder can now complete its 'round trip': from person to persona, and back again. Dropping the A takes the product to a new level. Other consumer tech companies would be smart to consider the same.