📰 How Perplexity builds product

Founded less than two years ago, Perplexity has become a many-times-a-day-use product for me, replacing many of my Google searches—and I’m not alone. With fewer than 50 employees, the company has a user base that’s grown to tens of millions. They’re also generating over $20 million ARR and taking on both Google and OpenAI in the battle for the future of search. Their recent fundraise of $63m values the company at more than $1 billion, and their investors include Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, Andrej Karpathy, Garry Tan, Dylan Field, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and Naval Ravikant (but sadly not me 😭). Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said he uses the product “almost every day.”

I sat down with Johnny Ho, the company’s co-founder and head of product, to give you an inside look at how Perplexity builds product—which to me feels like what the future of product development will look like for many companies

The more you move from consumers to enterprise clients, the more you'll need a sales force able to manage complex sales. As a rule of thumb, a more expensive product, in B2B or Enterprise, will require an organizational structure around sales. An inexpensive product to be offered to consumers will leverage marketing.

… Make your case against the substitute solution using a humouristic metaphor. Make your creative memorable, modern and engaging - in line with the change and improvement you’re promising.

Don’t forget about clarity. State your product category, call out your buyer persona and specify your offer. Otherwise, the prospect can easily get lost in the metaphor.

The best way to grow your audience as a creator is to publish great content consistently over a long period of time. Specific “growth tactics” will only be successful in bringing you new subscribers or followers — who stick around — if you’re putting out great content in the first place.

So, besides growth and monetization tactics, to help you make better content, we’ve also included a few entries designed to help you improve your workflow, helpful frameworks for approaching your work, and both copywriting and visual newsletter design advice.

Taking action has been a life-changing decision for me. It has brought a lot of clarity to my life and day-to-day activities. I get a lot of tasks done and improve myself consistently as well. It has put me on the path to slaying complacency, eliminating procrastination, and fulfilling my immense potential. These are four principles of how action breeds clarity, and how I implement them.

More than two-thirds of the companies surveyed said that they used NPS methodology with their customers. Some are using it to measure employee satisfaction as well.

The P stands for ‘promoter’, but of course, it doesn’t actually measure promotion.