The Fountain Institute is an independent online school that teaches advanced UX & product skills.
Monetizing at the Cost of the User Experience
Monetizing at the Cost of the User Experienceby Jeff Humble Dear Reader, Companies don't like to consider how customers can be annoyed by monetization. Companies are always looking for ways to monetize their assets. Even attention is monetized these days. As we'll see in two examples, monetization can make or break the user experience. Monetizing Fail: Yahoo’s Decline (1990s-2010s)
Yahoo used to be the tech darling of the internet, much like Google or OpenAI is today. The company had humble beginnings as a simple guide to the internet, but at its peak, Yahoo was worth over $100B in market value in 2000.
Fifteen years later, in 2015, Verizon bought them for a mere $4.83B, a hefty price but at a 95% discount from its high in 2000. How did it lose so much value? Yahoo couldn’t evolve past its dot-com-era understanding of customer needs. Google and Facebook realized consumer trends were going mobile in the early 2000s. The user experience was getting streamlined and simpler, but Yahoo was too focused on monetizing its web traffic. By 2015, this lack of vision meant Yahoo’s interface had an ad-heavy, cluttered approach, while Google’s slick interface was cleaner and worked better. Yahoo’s inability to understand consumer trends or form a cohesive user-centric vision prevented it from making the right strategic moves, ultimately costing it $95B in lost market share. Monetizing Win: Superhuman (2019-Present)
Superhuman is a powerful email app aimed at making work emails more productive. The company claims to save you four hours weekly while improving response times by two days. Everything about the app is built for pro-level business customers who need an edge, like salespeople. Superhuman uses a variety of approaches to achieve pro-level email:
Rather than monetizing with ads like Gmail, Superhuman prioritizes a slick, distraction-free user interface without ads to separate itself from the competition. They aim to make every interaction on the app less than 100 milliseconds so that the experience feels magical. They also have a 30-minute, extensive onboarding to teach customers how to use their keyboard shortcuts for a mouse-free user experience. It seems to work because Superhuman allegedly has 50k paying users at $30/month. While that might sound expensive for regular email users, their pro-level customer focus means companies like Notion, Dropbox, and Spotify count among their users. Monetization can enhance the user experience, not disrupt it. Superhuman shows us that some users are willing to pay for a better user experience. Superhuman's story can inspire you to find ways to monetize and improve the user experience at your company. Who better to do that than you? Source
Until next month, stay strategic! ✌️
|
The Fountain Institute
The Fountain Institute is an independent online school that teaches advanced UX & product skills.
The brief that keeps changing By Hannah Baker Dear Reader, There’s a particular kind of exhaustion I keep hearing about. It’s not burnout, exactly. It’s not being overworked. It’s something more specific, the feeling of being asked to plan something when the thing you’re planning for keeps shifting underneath you. I’ve been hearing it a lot lately. And more and more, it has AI somewhere in the middle of it. Here’s a version of a situation I keep encountering. Someone is working on two large...
OpenClaw Part 2: The 🦞 didn't replace Claude. It made me laugh instead. by Jeff Humble Dear Designer, In Part 1, I spent €590 on a Mac Mini, two days in Terminal, and $3.14 in API tokens I didn't mean to burn. I ended with a list of seven things I was going to automate with my OpenClaw agent 🦞. I only got to one of them. Getting an AI agent from zero to useful takes longer than any article will tell you. Most of the time since then has gone into figuring out how to make it reliable, not into...
The System You Can't See By Hannah Baker Dear Reader, Here's a question I get more than any other: "How do I handle the person who talks too much?" Or the flip side: "How do I get quiet people to speak up?" And every time, I want to say: you're asking the wrong question. Not because those moments aren't real or frustrating. They are. But because treating them as people problems is like looking at algae blooming in a pond and asking, "how do I fix the algae?" You don't. The algae isn't the...