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Time to magic moment: Claude, ChatGPT & Perplexity
How to activate AI products like an expert.
Some of the fastest growing companies right now are generative AI tools (genAI). Their growth is eye-watering:
- Claude reached $1 million in mobile app revenue 16 weeks after launch
- ChatGPT doubled it’s weekly active users from 100 to 200 million in a year
- Perplexity increased monthly revenue and usage 7X in 2024
What’s impressive is that this is a relatively new category of products. These tools have only been used by the general public in the last couple of years.
With new categories, there’s often the wish to ‘educate the customer’ on how to use the product.
But creating new behaviours in customers is hard.
Super hard.
Hence why these products have to do so incredibly well in onboarding users to drive new actions (like prompting and knowing what tasks to get help with).
Why genAI tools need to work harder than most
This is such an interesting case study because these products are so complex in how they’re made. They’re highly technical behind the scenes.
Whats brilliant is how they hide this complexity in the UI. They don’t try to explain how it works or shove complexity onto the user (unlike a lot of products).
Before doing this analysis, I had the wrong assumption that the UI wouldn’t be good. That they’d be stuffy and over-technical, or mention AI too much.
How wrong I was.
We’ll look at how my three favrouite genAI tools — Claude, Perplexity & ChatGPT — communicate value to their users, reduce friction and get new users to the core action ASAP. We’ll review:
- Landing page messaging
- Where core actions are placed in the UI and UX
- Time to magic moment
First up, Claude.
