Eric Siu compares ChatGPT's new app store to the early iOS App Store and argues it could be a major distribution channel. He advises teams to experiment quickly despite the risk, weighing potential upside against time investment based on conversations with his CTO and clients.
I wanna talk about this new distribution channel with 800 million users. So you wanna know what it is? ChatGPT? Yes, so what's interesting to me, this could be completely off, we can debate this, right? My take on this one is that open question today is ChatGPT just came out with its apps, right? And so when you think about iOS, when it first launched its App Store, there were 6 million users. Now, some people are saying like, look, this is just as important as Steve Jobs announcing the App Store in March of 2008. What I'll say is this, this could be a complete flop, but in my opinion, the risk-reward ratio, if you don't at least try this a little bit, and then what happens? The first apps on App Store, what happened? They started gaining a ton of traction. Yeah, and they held that ranking for a while. It's almost like the old days of SEO, right? Correct. Now a lot of those are disappeared, but yes. Correct. Yeah, but in my mind, I'm like, dude, if we can hit this quickly, so I was talking to my CTO about this, I was like, okay, let's just play around with this, right? And then we started floating this to clients as well. Like, why don't we do this? Because we're trying to embed ourselves more with the client. And they're down to talk about it. So my point is, if the risk is like you might spend a couple of weeks building this and if it's a flop, it's a flop. Okay, maybe you lose that time, but if it's a complete hit, then you're going to gain for, for a little bit like a year or 2 years.
