Inside How the Best AI products Grow | Brian Balfour (CEO Reforge)

the way that I like to describe it is like my usage with Google it just is increasingly turned into feeling like I'm consuming empty calories it's like I'm just eating junk food and just taking down Diet Cokes and stuff versus taking in substantial calories so that's been degrading over time and then the second piece of the equation is people have had harder and harder times converting visitors into whatever their goal is whether it's a user or a customer and stuff and so people have gotten more and more aggressive on the conversion techniques with like massive popovers and all this like GED stuff right so both of those things have just fundamentally degraded the quality and so I could do one of two things I could search Google and then I could sift through three or four results closing popups and reading through terrible SEO you know garbage optimized intros to get to the Nugget that I want or I can just plug it into perplexity and freaking spits out the answer my guest today is Brian bfor CEO of reforge Brian and I did a deep dive into how four of the best AI products grew so fast we spoke about why chat GPT is investing in custom gpts how mid Journey grew to 200 million annual recurring Revenue despite an interface that relies on Discord how perplexity is competing with Google search and how LinkedIn collaborative articles combines AI user growth loops to be the most underrated AI product Brian is one of the best growth leaders out there so I hope you enjoy our conversation consider subscribing for more great interviews every week all right well welcome Brian I'm so glad to have you here thanks for having me yeah so I took your reforce growth class like back in 2017 so super excited to talk to you about growing AI products yeah one of the cohorts so those 2016 2017 years were a lot of fun those were that was the beginning yeah not sure how much remember so glad to learn from you again yeah that's well interestingly enough that's always the challenge in education and we are building new product around that exact problem so we'll talk about that at a later date nice so I guess we're talk

about growing AI products so I guess we'll talk about the most successful one so far which is you know chat GPT so I think it came out early 20 late 2022 or early 23 like can you share like some of the growth groups that kind of Fu his rise to 100 million users yeah I think CH GPT is one of these interesting cases that nobody should try to follow because it's such a exception that if you do try to follow it that you're very likely to fail and so I think with most products It Go they all go through this sequence where you start with these nonl or these non-scalable tactics that to kind of start to get traction and start to get some of that energy going and then at some point you do the delicate dance of transitioning to something that is more compounding over time more of these like growth Loops I would say chat PT is one of these rare scenarios where they had such a you know what I would call mindblowing differentiated like product user experience that it essentially they essentially went from Z to 100 million users just by building a 10x differentiated experience and that experience fueled a couple different things one was a certainly Word of Mouth people talking about it with each other but that also manifested in some other ways like other versions of Word of Mouth which would be people taking what they were doing on chat chbt recording a short video image sharing it to social that captured like the media's attention and then the media attention like continued to fuel it it really was capturing lightning in a bottle around these things and I think this is such a dangerous example for others to follow because especially builders get in this mindset when they're building their own thing that they also feel like they have this lightning in a bottle and in 99,999 times out of 10,000 that's actually not the case and that's not the Playbook to

Playbook that's not the Playbook to follow now chat GPT actually is shifting into a totally different issue set which is that they grew so fast on the acquisition side that they now have to think about how am I going to retain and activate these users and a lot of AI products are actually going through the same thing where the novelty effect of what these products can do really Capt a lot of acquisition interest before people have really solidified the cement around what are those activation and those retention pieces and so a big open question right now is how much leeway do these products have how much timely way to get these systems in place before people just get burned out and they don't even like reattempt to use the product again it's actually pretty unclear and chaty actually benefited quite a bit from maintaining just public interest and PR interest and releasing these big model updates and other components that have that basically acted like a lot of reactivation Loops to get people back in but certainly underneath the hood I've seen the data is like gen products are retaining at a much worse rate than non gen products but they have serious acquisition interest so I know we're going to talk about gpts I think this kind of plays into that effect as well yeah like you know just talking to real people I can only be part of like a handful of group chats at the same time so like how many AI chat Bots can I talk to you know on a regular basis yeah well totally so I think there's you know as I've gone deeper on this space I think in the AI space there's this whole concept of input and output friction so essentially with something like chat GPT there's how much input how much effort do I need to go through to get it to generate the output that I want right and in chat gpt's case well I actually have to give it quite a bit right like if any if you've gone any sort of deep on prompt engineering you understand that actually there's all of these crazy different methodologies about how to give it instructions reasoning techniques context all these kinds of things but the effort there is actually really high and then there's the output friction which is how do I take the output and make it useful and whatever it is I'm trying to do that could be totally different depending on the use case of chat GPT and so I think actually chat GPT is on one end of the expection where both of those things are actually very high and then when you consider something like GitHub co-pilot they're on the other end of the spectrum where there's almost zero input friction I'm typing code that I would have to type otherwise I'm actually not going through any incremental effort and then the output friction is also very low I just have to hit tab or some other key for it to like fill out the rest of the code it's like the auto complete so they're on the other end of the spectrum and I think that's probably why they are doing a much better job at you know High retaining High retention users over time

and this is where I think GPT strategy the input friction is where the GPT strategy for chat GPT starts to come into account if you I don't know if that's where you want to go deep on oh okay yeah you mean the custom gpts right yeah like they seem very interested in like building a platform you know first through apis and then plugins which didn't really work now with gpts and I guess GPT to me is just like a way to save like a really long prompt but is that what you're going with yeah 100% right like so I actually a lot of people have been comparing plugins and gbds but I actually think they were quite different plugins were about how to increase the capabilities of what the tool could like execute for you and plugins kind of fell a little bit flat there's just there's like too many the error rate on it is just like way too high GPT is the platform is like a little bit different which is I think it gets to it it's lowering the input friction especially for new users or users who aren't going to get Advanced right so rather than you know I don't know learning how to get this thing to teach me a new topic or something like there's a bunch of like learning gpts for example where you just like plug in the topic that you want to learn about and then there's a whole set of sequence of things that it goes through to like teach you this topic now if you just have chat GPT you've got to not only give it the topic you want to learn but a whole set of instructions around how you want this thing to teach you right and what you want it to do in order to go through that back and forth that's a very high effort and very few people are actually going to go ahead and do this and so now there's like a learning GPT where I don't have to do all input all that all I have to do is input the topic and the rest of the prompt as you said is like is basically already written and so I think gbds is really just it's an activation and an engagement play for chat GPT like here in the short term is to massively reduce that input friction that users need to get value out of the product and that'll like fundamentally like play into to retention as part of it yeah that's a really good point like I you know I guess I'm a power user I personally build a bunch of like personal gpts i t too much about myself and then definitely a power user yeah for sure yeah but because I have always personal GPS do various things I probably don't want to switch to a L platform just because I've saved all these prompts in gpds that I use on a regular basis so interesting yeah it was a you know months ago I was talking with Joff Redfern who was he's the former CPO of atlasing we were brainstorming on this and my initial take was kind of what you just said which is like oh let people publish the prompts you know in like a ugc way so that I can just I can like save them and copy and paste them in front of myself very easily in the product and I think gpts was just like a better version of that where I don't as a user I don't even have to understand what the prompt is behind the thing I just add this thing like I'm adding an application and I give it a little bit of information and it kind of does it sort of does the rest behind it the scenes so I thought it was a pretty good execution pretty it was taking the power users like you and now they're trying to like layer on incentives like the r share and all that kind of stuff to get you to like turn those into gpts and put them in the store and let other people use them what kind of I guess what kind of mode would you call that is that like a network mode or like broadly speaking like what kind of modes do you think chat CB has with all these other chat Bots coming up it's unclear I think the certainly they're using this specific case that we're talking about they are using their 100 million user number to try to attract a bunch of people to create a bunch of gpts and lower this input friction you know which I'll increase engagement and and then monetization right and because all of the other ones whether that's Microsoft co-pilot or aard or others are going to have the exact same problem we just talked about right it's they're built for a very horizontal very general use case and as a result you know horizontal use cases they're Pro is their con they can be used for so many different things which is their Pro but that also means they can be used for so many different things and it's actually really hard to get a user to understand what it is that they can use this thing for and I guess in prei world right horizontal products solve that by creating these huge template libraries right you can see that in things like Loom and notion Ando and all of these other horizontal products and so I think gpts is kind of the the same thing and so I think there will be a question of well do these other General use case type of chat experiences do they get enough volume demand to essentially replicate you know this GPT layer or in the prei world like the template layer you know to get help people get activated on these products I'm not sure yet right it wasn't it's not really a defensibility thing in the world of productivity tools like notion and miror was really an acquisition and engagement mechanism that really helped accelerate it but as you can see there's so many folks that have completely replicated that template strategy to solve the horizontal use case problem in that world and I think there's still a question of whether or not like what they've cre with this actually creates defensibility or not I do think it certainly accelerates us and the amount of data that they're getting and how they're using that for reinforcement like all these things that I think everybody's hypothesized will be the real advantages to getting to model advancements and like essentially and eventually like AGI but certainly you know certainly like I think that's the real race I don't think any of these products are thinking about Network effects like we did or other defensibility mechanisms like we did in the pre world I think everything that they're probably doing is being ran through an internal strategic filter on how does this thing you know get us faster to AGI or not because the first person to get there is going to that's probably the ultimate like defense ability that's the ultimate like separator so I don't know we'll see it's a different world for sure yeah that totally makes sense all right well

why don't I move on to another product mid Journey so we talked about how activation is really important but like you know for Mid Journey like their entire user interface is based entirely in Discord and even for me it took me like a while to figure out how to even make an image you know so I think he thought this before but like why do you think they pursu the strategy and like how why has it worked out for them so far yeah I give a lot of credit to niil hayatt who's uh General partner at spark for he came on this podcast that I do with a guy named fed masak um who we've also interviewed a couple unsolicited feedback and we talked through mid Journey's strategic decision here in the growth model and it's one of these fascinating use cases right where one of the common pieces of advice you know for early breakout startups is like hey you've got to choose a channel that has like low competition right because if it already has like high competition in your space you don't have like the resources or whatever else you need to truly compete and to truly break out and this was I think one of those examples where mid Journey made a very strategic Choice early on is like they chose Discord as a very strategic choice for their some of their product elements and some of their distribution elements and you know Discord had a lot of growth users but there weren't really examples of other companies that had built off the back of that distribution I mean maybe you could say a bunch of random ass crypto projects I don't know if we want to those or not right yeah but certainly not a company that was getting to hundreds of millions of sustainable ARR like mid Journey has and as Niel kind of pointed out as we talked through this there are there's like a few interesting pieces of this strategic Choice one and I thought the most important one was that mid journey is very clearly a product that is easy to start with and hard to master as you mentioned you can plug in any kind of query where you're like I want you know an image of an office background with you know plants and a few posters right and you'll get something but actually like nudging it in the right directions and getting it exactly you know what you want it has actually a lot of those deep capabilities but understanding and learning those things it actually it's like really hard to master and would be almost impossible for either mid Journey themselves to educate the user base at scale themselves on how to do that or the users just getting there on their own and instead what this Discord model really leaned into was this whole model where I'm publishing a lot of my Creations queries like publicly in these Discord channels not only that is that there's very low friction to starting to collaborate and communicate with the other users about their Creations to like learn on my own and all of a sudden you've got this like user to the user learning to happen and so if you haven't yet you should go into you know they published a lot of the mid Journey Creations kind of on this like semi feed and if you click into it you can see the prompt behind it and you read these prompts and it reads like a foreign language you're like what the hell did all of these things mean right but that's what I mean by like hey this thing actually has really incredible depth right that is really hard to master and that strategic Choice actually not only allowed them to do that but it lowered the friction for that user and that like Community element to like really start to take shape in a really fast way there were some other elements of this like you know mid Journey's early adopters were all like there was like high overlap between that and Discord users right so obviously you've got to choose a channel that where that overlap is like very high and it exists but it also allowed them to you know not have to worry about building a bunch of product surface area themselves to get these elements to happen just imagine what it would have uh taken to build those onboarding flows build the chat interface right build like the feeds like all of those elements it would have been a [ __ ] ton of work and they so they basically offloaded that all on a different product and a different Channel and that came with some trade-offs some cons it certainly probably turned some users away but what they gained you know in response to that was well I got they focus on what was most important which was building this model around you know the best uh type of image generation and some of those other advantages that I talked about and so I think that's probably one of the important lessons in here is I think a lot of people avoid early controversial bets like this because they're like oh I'm going to like there's always cons to these are channels right and they focus way too much on the cons what they're losing and they don't really focus on well what can I gain from that decision as like a starting as a starting point as well so anyways I think it's a very fascinating case and if you don't know they scaled to a couple hundred million dollars of AR with like less than 20 employees it's just like such an amazing story in use case yeah they really focused on like what really matters which is like the quality of the model right like to this day mid Journey has the best you know realistic images out there I think yeah and my bet is that over time what they're going to now that obviously they'll keep focusing on that strength and so then the question becomes okay well do I start to build tooling now that I have the best [ __ ] model right in the most traction do I start to build tooling around this to add like even more to this product and other pieces of the equation so it'll be interesting to see what they do next I think uh I read a tweet where they actually did build a web interface to generate images but it it's only available to like people who generate thousands of images already like very focused on I guess it really kind of focus on the hardcore user to make them you know Empower them and then have them spread the word to the more casual people yeah totally and I do think that's one of the more you know one of the interesting points is that they have I think as things have emerged obviously a lot of stuff has come into competition in the image generation space adobe's done a bunch of stuff canva has or starting to do a bunch of stuff and you know I think where mid journey is like really focused is they've leaned more towards the advanced users the hardcore users and that's like really where they they've monetized and I think there's like a real Market there to the Casual Image generation space where maybe if I have that need maybe I'm just doing that via chat gbt and dolly or something like that and it's usually how these markets take shape is like you got a product in the Casual user space hardcore user space and the strategies are different right but both can end up being really big opportunities and I think mid Journey has really positioned themselves probably more in that hardcore user space a long term so they're almost like the new age Photoshop to you know versus the New Age canva just based on like you know Market segmentation yeah that's

reallyy good point actually because yeah I was worried like you know like chat CH can just put 100 million users to fors to generate images but I guess Mitch doesn't really compete there so yeah yeah my expectation is they continue to go down the hardcore Market which is why I bet they take a bet on starting to build tooling around this they probably have smaller audience but higher price points you know all these things that are kind of pretty typical when you target that segment of the market got it all right well let's

talk about another fun AI product um I'm not sure if you use uh perplexity I have placed Mo most of my Googling has what about you has it uh it has oh yeah I still use Google out of habit just because like it's available in the browser like directly but like yeah a lot of times perplexity getes much better results you know yeah no agree so I guess maybe you can share like why you like perplexity more just probably people are less familiar with this product than the other two yeah I think if I just talked about it from a user perspective I think there's a couple reasons one is we have now been through years of essenti just the internet getting filled with very like lowquality surface level content and it it's been this like Giant game of telephone the content marketing Playbook has been let me look at the top five to 10 queries let me aggregate a bunch you know a bunch of the stuff from those queries to like get back to number one and then rinse and repeat and then other people do it and so it's like this giant game of telephone where things just keep getting more and more watered down and so the way that I like to describe it is like my usage with Google just has increasingly turned into feeling like I'm consuming empty calories like you know like it's like I'm just eating junk food and you know just taking down Diet Cokes and stuff versus eating something you know taking in substantial you know substantial calories and so that's one piece so that's been degrading over time and then the second piece of the equation is that because it's been degrading over time people have had hard and harder times converting visitors into whatever their goal is whether it's a user or a customer and stuff and so people have gotten more and more aggressive on the conversion techniques with like massive popovers and all this like gated stuff right so both of those things have just fundamentally degraded the quality and so for most of my searches like this morning I was I'm very into like trying to gain weight and put on I put on muscle right now get little personal and so there's I'm like doing a lot of like how much protein is in X and like all this kind of stuff and so I could do one of two things I could search Google and then I could sift through three or four results closing popups and reading through terrible SEO you know garbage optimized intros to get to the Nugget that I want or I can just plug it into perplexity and it freaking spits out the answer but not only that is like I can look at the sources that it's pulling from and then a quick glance of like make a judgment call do I like do I trust the sources that they're pulling from or do I need to like dig deeper or prompted to you know prompted to pull from prompted for deeper sources so that's why I like it like as a user so it's replaced the majority I would say the majority of my Google searches and I think the additional part of that is even though it's replaced the majority of my Google searches and it SES sources I almost never go to the store is you know I'm literally using it as a judg call on like whether I trust this the source or not versus going all the way to the source which has its own implications yeah this is a very complicated ecos system yeah

but yeah like the whole dude like the whole SE industry is like a bugman like it should not exist If the product what was good you know people yeah but there's some other things that need to happen like so you know there's a lot of like Google searches that aren't informational queries like that they take some other form for example if I was like you know like one of the products we have in reforge is called artifacts it's like the real work from operators you can see like real road maps prds experiment docs strategy docs that people have written on forer things to like you know get inspiration and elements right and you know when somebody searches in you know I would say like product road map for examples for a B2B startup that's not a type of query that's going to work in perplexity right now like still want to see the actual asset the actual examples and there are types of queries like that and so I don't know where perplexity is going with their strategy but you can't think about Google as a world of like one type of search that's actually a bunch of different subcategories of types of searches and I think there's a question of well each one of those categories is actually a ginormous freaking market and so I don't know if you need to replace all of them to build a really compelling company I actually think you could take a meaningful bite out of one of them and still build a pretty compelling company as part of it like if you were the founder of perplexity like how would you grow this thing is it just like people like yourself tweeting that this is replace Google or how do you grow this I actually think that's a really hard question I think I was thinking a little bit about this before we chatted and I don't feel like I have really have a great answer I remember even early Google days it was like all Word of Mouth yeah right that's like really how it spread and then over time you know one of their methodologies to essentially build habit and all that kind of stuff is that they just started taking over the entry points of where people would start searches where it was like mobile or the browser or through Partnerships and all those types of things and so there's possibly a similar I don't think perplexity is going to go build a browser but it's possible actually that perplexity wants to go down the partnership path and we already kind of St saw the start of this just this past weekend or last week where I don't know if you've pre-ordered the R1 rabbit device that was announced a couple weeks ago at CES but it's like one of the new hot AI Hardware things and it looks like they went out and did a partnership with them to be kind of one of the default experiences there so that's potentially that's actually potentially a path depending on what type of you know are they going to go are they really optimizing their experience for these like informational types of queries you know obviously they've got this paid plan which they call co-pilot which I actually think The Branding is freaking terrible but because it's so in space because it does not do what other co-pilots like Microsoft's co-pilot and stuff does but that's very much built for like a research use case helping you like go through multiple steps so maybe there's like a multiplayer aspect to that at some point but then I'm like ah well like what percentage of my use case is that like am I really going to invite a ton of people in there so I actually think this is an interesting question I don't have a great answer for how perplexity continues to grow Beyond like word of mouth and Partnerships of like integrating into these new places it'll be interesting to see what they do I think word of mouse can probably take them pretty far like just like make a meme generator their social results and Googles give you to share it I to go pretty far yeah well I think there's a limited window for that type of I think it still exists right but I definitely think the novelty effect of that type of stuff of oh look at this cool thing like AI built you know generat for me it's G to wear off at some point right at some point yeah at some point the dopamine hits that we're getting from that is you know we're going to fatigue from it got it all

right well let's talk about the most Innovative next let's talk about L thing which is usually behind a curving Innovation but they launched these collaborative articles that actually I actually contribute to one but yeah oh you did let me ask why did you contribute to one well it asked me some questions about like you know oh like you're recognized as an expert in like product management like you should go contribute this article and I went there and like some of the answers were terrible random people like really terrible answers so I was like oh I feel I need to actually correct these answers so then I fix it yeah so that's why I put my stuff in there yeah it's hilarious that was like the motivation to get you to contribute yeah look I think if you haven't looked at this I actually from a we've always said in reforge that LinkedIn is just they're just like Masters at this whole concept of layering on growth Loops into their product and this is another great example of it I think where a bunch of people basically just went and started generating a bunch of you know content almost completely written by an llm to like rank for SEO and all those other people which LinkedIn could have very easily done and probably would have gotten positive results from that they looked at it slightly different and they said well I'm going to use the llm to solve the cold start problem on content I'm going to have it generate the outlines and some like intro paragraphs to common questions you know that to rank and results but then what I'm going to do is I'm going to get our users to basically add their thoughts on top of these sections of the article so it's like kind of mixing this AI generated content with this user generated content and what that does is a bunch of things one is that it adds unique content to the overall article and therefore it's going to like rank much higher it's going to rank much higher in SEO it also gives them this opportunity to refresh the content automatically so if they see something dropping in the rankings all they have to do is Bump this shared article in their algorithm you know to get more people to contribute to add like more unique like more fresh stuff there's like all these components to it that I think make it really interesting from a growth Dynamic per perspective and as a result like if you go to like any of the SEO tools the traffic on these pages is just like up into it's like one of the most up into the right curves that I've ever seen especially for SEO which usually takes a long time to bake right like that's one of the major cons and that has not been true for this and so it's been amazing from that perspective to see how they've like used this to create kind of this new hybrid type of growth Loop but the question is like it you're right like most of the content I've seen it is crap it isn't good at all and so like what happens to here because like crap just feeds more crap right like especially when you're talking about gen models you like garbage in garbage out so but maybe they'll come up with techniques to identify you know the needles and the hay stock the high quality stuff like do more with it I don't know but from a growth perspective I thought it was pretty fascinating they also have this additional incentive where you know if you contribute to enough of these articles you get like a badge top thought leadership voice badge oh yeah yeah I mean they're playing the like gamification mechanics you know to a te on this one to get people to get part people to participate so it's interesting and then there other thing that they've launched which I think is still only available for premium users is they have launched like a chat like an assistant experience and then in the feed they autogenerate these questions below the feed items and you can click on it and it auto opens the assistant and feeds it to the llm and stuff and it's an interesting I played around with it at the beginning when they first launched it but I have not used it like since but I think it's an interesting example of you know I think a lot of these products are what launching these chat experiences these assistant experiences and what I've seen is that they get a lot of oneandone users people use the chat once and then don't come back to it a lot because like the novelty effect they don't really going back to the original problems we were talking about earlier with like chat GPT and so what LinkedIn is exercising here is another really interesting growth lesson which is what we call like environmental triggers in reforge which is they're finding surface areas in the product that already has eyeballs and they're generating like very low friction oneclick triggers to get people into like the AI experience and their method of doing that is like they take a LinkedIn post that might be a little bit long and then they add these like oneclick triggers at the bottom which is like you know what are the top three points out of this long post right like stuff like that so you know it's interesting to watch you know watch this team you know play around with this stuff and kind of see like what works and what doesn't work yeah I haven't seen the system feature yeah I think linkedin's growth team knows their [ __ ] they clearly know what they're doing they gota maybe their strategies to just embrace the cringe you know just because they embra thech the platform well for sure like I think you know linkedin's business model is baked on I need to get people back to the platform submitting as much profile data as possible because I'm going to go sell that data to recruiters sales people advertisers in various forms in various tools that's the whole business model so at some point like they don't really care about the quality of this content and stuff if it's generating engagement they really only care about the quality of your profile data because that's what they're selling that's what they earn their dollars on yeah it's actually really brilliant for Social Network I think is very Diversified yeah um yeah I

guess just to wrap up with one question like what are your thoughts on this whole you know AI wave overall you think it's like and also like how do you think it'll impact growth as a discipline kind of broad but yeah I think it's very powerful it's probably a more powerful shift than I lived through like the shift to mobile I think it's actually more powerful than that long term and so I am definitely on the like Pro side of it the very much like Optimist side of it and in creating opportunity and so I think from the growth perspective you know I have a few thoughts one is I think there are growth opportunities in chaos so when like something gets thrown into the mix and chaos is created you like usually these Arbitrage these new opportunities really emerge right and that creates opportunities for non incumbents you know the upstarts to find these opportunities and like and really leverage them and I think we're going to certainly see that and are seeing that and we are seeing that to a degree I think it takes some of the old methodologies like content and stuff and in the short term makes them better by making them more efficient but I think in the long term will basically render them useless so I think like some of these things some of these effects are going to go through like a whiplash essentially where they're positive at first and then very negative overall and I think as that happens and as the novelty effect of AI like wears off I think all of these products are going to be very much shifted into I think right now basically what you do is you can launch an AI product you can call it AI you can like name it AI features like all that kind of stuff and just doing that gathers like a lot of interest but that's going to go away at some point and as a result people are going to start to have to like shift to solving other problems whether that's around activation uh reten and engagement figuring out how to position and communicate you know differentiated value props without you know using AI as the differentiator because at some point almost like every single product is going to be AI powered to some degree and so it's almost like this opportunity where you can take advantage of some of these short-term things but at some point it all ends up regressing back towards like the foundational things the foundational lessons and growth like how do I position how do I communicate clearly how do I find Arbitrage opportunities like all of those things that are sitting at the core Foundation like that's where this all kind of regresses back towards at some point yeah like how do I retain you users that's kind of important in the AI world yeah it's funny we're in this period where it's not the most important thing but it will be over the long term it 100% so I want to give you a chance to talk about like does reforge have any great AI courses coming up or how do people learn more about this stuff in the right way yeah we do yeah if you're product manager and growth marketing this is like where we really specialize we have multiple different uh courses on AI depending on what angle you're coming at it from and what you're building so definitely check that out we also have a bunch of specialty courses around things like marketplaces networks as well as your core topics you know product strategy product leadership where you we're talking about how AI kind of affects those things in the grand scheme of it I would also as I mentioned before fared masat and I have this podcast called unsolicited feedback we're taking a bunch of these new products and new launches we're breaking it down we're kind of giving our own take our own unsolicited feedback on those things so definitely check that out and if I get any spare moment from my kids and work life I will eventually get back to blogging on my site at brianb 4. com so no promises is on actual dates though awesome all right well thank you so much for your time Brian really appreciate it thanks Peter