Catalog

Top 5 unmet needs (67 interviews)

1. Onboarding takes too long — 41 customers
   "I gave up before my first usable result." (I-12) · "Two evenings to set up something I wanted to try in ten minutes." (I-38)
   Trigger: trying the product between meetings, on a phone.
2. Sharing with the team is friction — 33
   "I ended up screenshotting the dashboard into Slack." (I-05)
3. Integration with the existing stack — 29
4. Pricing surprise in month two — 24
5. Progress does not sync between devices — 18

Early signals
- Offline mode — I-12, I-38, I-51: "I'd pay for it to just work on the train." Unprompted in three separate interviews; not noise.
- Public API — I-22 only.

Contradictions
- 14 customers want fewer notifications; 9 want a daily nudge. Both groups are under 30 days in.

Say vs. want
- Say: "more features." Want, from behaviour: the three they already use to be faster. (I-07, I-44)

Follow-ups for next round
1. "What did you expect to have working within ten minutes?"
2. "Who else looks at this, and how do they see it today?"

Convergence
1. D2C ed-tech CAC has risen 30–40% over 18 months — McKinsey (n=200 companies), a16z note, Coursiv S-1 excerpt. Representative: "blended CAC up 36% YoY" (McKinsey). Confidence HIGH.
2. Subscription outperforms one-time pricing for content products — all four. Confidence HIGH.
3. Trial length matters less than trial-to-paid messaging — three of four; the fourth is silent. Confidence MEDIUM.

Biggest disagreement
McKinsey: auto-renewal optimisation is the largest revenue lever. a16z: cohort-driven retention beats it. Stronger side: McKinsey — 200-company sample versus a16z's four anecdotes, and McKinsey's data is 2025 while a16z's examples are 2023.

The question none of them answers
What happens to LTV when you send an honest reminder before auto-renewal. Likely gap: no operator has run it at scale, and the consultancies are paid by companies that do not want to.

Read or measure next: your own month-3 retention by acquisition channel — every source above assumes it is uniform, and for your decision it is the number that matters.

Weekly briefing — AI search and research tools, 29 Apr – 6 May

1. ChatGPT Deep Research extended to 30-minute runs with export (OpenAI release notes, 2 May) — Why: your "research faster" lesson shows a 5-minute run; the screenshots are stale. Do: re-capture by Friday.
2. Perplexity Spaces adds shared instructions for teams (Perplexity blog, 30 Apr) — Why: your team-research module assumes personal Spaces. Do: a one-paragraph update.
3. Google AI Mode expands to 12 countries incl. DE and ES (Google blog, 1 May) — Why: 40% of your traffic is DE/ES; organic click-through will move. Do: watch Search Console for two weeks.
4. Anthropic raises Claude file limits (Anthropic docs, 3 May) — Why: your "upload 400 pages" lesson can cite a bigger number. Do: nothing yet.
5. Perplexity reported raising at $18B (The Information, 5 May) — unverified, single source — affects nothing you ship.

Safe to ignore: the "AI search is dead" essay — opinion, no data.
Quiet item: AI Mode ad formats mentioned in a Google developer note (4 May) — if ads enter AI answers, your CAC assumptions change in Q3.