Hey folks, welcome to this week's edition of Product Bites! This issue is going to be short and sweet to give you a break during the vacation season. Plus, I'm currently under the weather thanks to my lovely toddlers. So, let's dive right in.

There are many ways to win in SaaS.

Beautiful post that explores the relationship between annual contract value (ACV - how much are your new customers paying 💰) and sales velocity (how fast are you at closing 🚀).

Looking at the quadrants from the image below your goal is to never land in the bottom left (aka death zone) or find ways to get out there as quickly as possible. Ways to do that range from reevaluating pricing, improving the product, increasing sales efficiency, or introducing a PLG motion. A complete pivot is the ultimate ratio when product market fit is not sufficient. The dream quadrant is obviously quick deals combined with high ACV (rare combo - and not a must to be successful).

For SMB deals, closing a $1k deal should take no longer than a week (around a month for $10k deals). For enterprise deals (over $1 million), it may take around 12 months to close, but this is a luxury that most startups cannot afford, and usually requires functions such as account-based marketing.

I just love this non-official Gucci campaign 🐴🤠. All AI generated with Midjourney. The AI prompter might be the new creative director. (link)

Rationale AI claims to help you consider both sides of an issue and make rational decisions. It's like having an autopilot for (product) management - for now, it's more like having a decision co-pilot.

I asked Rationale AI if it made sense to introduce a hybrid work setup, and the proposed decision, along with its pros and cons, gave me a good starting point to think about the specific situation. It was not mind-blowing but definitely faster than coming up with 3 pros and cons yourself. I did not try to feed it with more business context but will continue testing.

I believe their competitive advantage (aka moat) could come from tracking the outcomes of decisions over the long term and learning from them plus optimising the UI to the specific decisioning case (in the end it’s “just” another GPT wrapper).

It's interesting to observe and experiment with. They offer some free coins per month to test the service.

Many smart and influential people, including Elon Musk, have called for a pause on the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 for at least 6 months.

This is a complex issue with many different viewpoints to consider. Below are just two of the extreme views: Eliezer Yudkowsky, in a scary read on TIME, argues that "the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die." He suggests that creating something much smarter than humans would require precision, preparation, and new scientific insights.

On the other hand, Bill Ackman argues on Twitter that "shutting down AI development for six months gives the bad guys six more months to catch up. Our enemies are working hard to develop their own OpenAI. It would have been a mistake to delay the Manhattan Project and let the Nazis catch up. I don’t think we have a choice."

It's worth digging into this rabbit hole discussion (important to recognize that people involved may have their own agenda).

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That’s a wrap. Keep building 💪

Till