Hi everyone,
Recently I got a weird hyperfixation on a reality show, Clarkson’s Farm. Jeremy Clarkson hosted Top Gear for many years, and now he has a show about his farming. I won’t steal your time with the details, but it’s wildly entertaining and I really enjoy it.
What I wanted to tell you is that at some point he opened a farm shop to sell the produce he makes on the farm. And what fascinates me, he makes way less profit from the shop than when he sells his produce to other vendors, especially in bulk. can’t even be compared. But it doesn’t stop him. He still invests a lot in the shop, and he loves having it.
It got me thinking that we do the same with our products. We want to bring everything to our territory and control it. Even when it’s not necessarily the best strategy.
So today I wanted to dig into this.
THE CHALLENGE
The challenge a lot of teams have right now is should we bring users to our product, or go where they already are?
We want to own the user and anchor them to our product. There’s this belief that the more you do that, the better the retention will be. And it’s completely true. But building a new habit and a new ecosystem is way more difficult than getting embedded into something that already exists in people’s lives organically.
We are not new to integrations, duh. Everyone wanted to integrate with Slack, Google Calendar, etc. But right now we have completely new ecosystems, and they are so personalized and so easy to use that switching from them to somewhere else seems like an incredible chore.
Whether we like it or not, AI chats just put a completely new bar for every product that exists. People will judge your product against Claude, Grok and ChatGPT, against their convenience and their knowledge of context.
And I feel like we’re entering a space where integrating with these new super ecosystems won’t be a choice anymore, but a requirement.
THE GAP
So why is the chat so hard to compete with, even when your product is better at the job?
I think it’s because habits stick to places. When we do something in the same place over and over, the place starts making the decision for us. There’s a study that shows this really well.
Researchers handed out free popcorn to people watching movie trailers. Some boxes were fresh. Some were a week old, and everyone could tell it was bad. Half the people watched in a cinema. The other half watched in a plain meeting room.
So who ate the stale popcorn?
People who always eat popcorn at the movies ate it in the cinema just like the fresh one, about 63% of the box either way. The same kind of people in the meeting room ate half as much stale as fresh. They knew it tasted bad in both rooms. But the cinema setting just made them ignore it.
The AI chat is the cinema now. People already go there for everything, so inside it they ask and act without thinking twice. When you bring them to your product instead, you move them to the meeting room. Now they weigh every bite, and next to a chat that already knows them, your product has to win every single visit.
HOW TO WORK WITH IT
Claude and ChatGPT even made me adopt products that struggled to convert me before. I never adopted Notion, but right now, it’s the place where I put my release notes and all the context of my PRs before I hand them to the tech team. I do it through Claude; I don’t really do it myself, but guess what, I’m a happy customer.
So I started paying more and more attention to how products show that they can be embedded in my current workflow. There are different ways to do it, and here are three I really like.
1. Amplitude comes to you
Amplitude runs a whole new positioning about building self-improving products. Essentially they’re saying you won’t have to do anything, we will tell you what’s going on. And instead of highlighting their dashboards and how you can operate within the product, they highlight how they integrate with your Slack or Claude. They come to you, and you operate their product through the platforms you’re already using.
2. Granola moves the notes to where they’re needed
Granola is positioned as an AI note taker, and they do a very good job of being embedded in your current workspaces. I love that they have the MCP connection, because they understand that within the AI ecosystem the handoff is very important. Meeting notes on their own don’t matter much. We need to share them somehow, and no one wants to go and copy them. Everyone wants to integrate them, for example with an AI chat that’s connected to their task manager or sends updates to Slack.
Questions? Leave a comment, I’ll answer.
3. PostHog lets you set it up with AI
PostHog just highlights that you can install and set up their system with AI. I think it’s very important for people who are AI native right now. They don’t want to dig through the documentation or go through the onboarding. They just want to paste the code and operate the new product through their current ecosystem.
And what’s important here: it must be a cohesive positioning that is connected from your website to your product. Admit that people are using products in new ways and show them how your tool won’t be an additional old-time headache.
ONE THING TO REMEMBER
Don't teach people your way when you can match theirs. Get embedded in the journey they already have, and I promise you'll get better adoption and happier users.