Different… or same-same?
The top story in Business Insider this week was the head-grabbing, doom-and-gloom article 'A minor ChatGPT update is a warning to founders: Big Tech can blow up your startup at any time'.
What is the update that will (potentially) blow up your startup? OpenAI is introducing the ability to upload PDFs to ChatGPT and then ask ChatGPT questions about the content of that document. If you ask me, it is a feature so basic that I would see it as a normal course of action for a company of that size and importance. Something like this shouldn't even make the news. But it did. Reading the article further, the authors ponder about the many startups that are using the functionality of ChatGPT to provide additional services. What are they going to do??
What do these companies do in the first place? They took a look at ChatGPT, assessed the current features, thought about all the other functions that would be useful to others, quickly built the extra functionality (that was referred to as a 'wrapper' in the article) on top of ChatGPT and launched a new product. A good example is Jasper.ai, which brands itself as 'an AI copilot for enterprise marketing teams who want better outcomes, not just faster outputs.' Based on the money raised, its valuation was as high as $1.5 billion, although recently, the company adjusted its internal valuation by 20%.
Perhaps management was overly optimistic about the market uptake of their products, maybe the economy is slowing down and marketing budgets are always the first to go (wrong approach, but that's for another post) or just maybe, the magic of OpenAI is available to others and no longer represents a competitive edge.
Doing a quick search on Google 'Jasper.ai using OpenAI,’ one of the first links takes you to Jasper.ai website, where in painstaking detail, the company explains why - despite the awesomeness of ChatGPT - it still provides better value than ChatGPT on its own. The lengthy post (ironically well-optimized for SEO) talks about the many differences, indicating a clear superiority of Jasper.ai over ChatGPT... until the last section.
It reads:
Will ChatGPT replace Jasper?
ChatGPT is not a replacement for Jasper because it's not fine-tuned specifically for marketing and business use cases the way Jasper is.
For example, ChatGPT doesn't offer Brand Voice capabilities which makes it hard for teams to create consistently great, on-brand content.
ChatGPT is a great intro to conversational AI, but is better used for personal tasks.
…and this is where it breaks.
The fact that the company has to write a blog post about how different it is from the supplier of the underlying technology is a problem. The fact that it is debating a question about the future of the technology it has zero influence over is naïve. The fact that its argument about Brand Voice capabilities is easily dismissed by another Google search 'ChatGPT command for brand voice' returning hundreds of results shows Jasper.ai’s lack of understanding of the market. All of this points to an incredibly weak market position.
Does Jasper.ai deliver value to its customers? I am sure it does, and I am sure that its customers are happy. But does the current version of Jasper.ai have any strategic advantage and any future? Unlikely. The market is already full of systems, products, solutions, and tools that are widely used. It’s only a matter of time before all these companies add ChatGPT to their mix. Just read this guide from HubSpot. Adding the functionality will cost HubSpot a few dollars. Jasper.ai, on the other hand, has to build all the functionality of HubSpot. I used HubSpot as an example, but any mature company in the content marketing space has an advantage over a company that started in 2021 and uses a tool that is available to anyone.
Recurrent pattern? When building the strategy for your company, make sure that the technology will provide you with a distinct competitive advantage that others will have a hard time replicating. So far, Jasper.ai is missing that pattern.