[The new funnel](/lab/ai-funnel/)
Justin Duke [writes](https://www.jmduke.com/posts/llm-born.html?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me):
Almost all of [Buttondown’s recent spike in growth] I attribute to LLMs. We ask people when they sign up what brought them here, and an answer that went from surprising to banal to overwhelming over the course of Q1 was: an LLM. Users of all stripes cite an LLM as the reason that they ended up at Buttondown’s front door.
His post offers some crunchy and provocative details, so I recommend clicking over to read it.
I can add, anecdotally, that in Q1 of this year, Fat Gold saw its first subscription referrals from LLMs. We don’t (can’t?) track these programmatically, but we do ask new annual subscribers where they heard about us, and, for the first time, the reply has come: Claude sent me.
What a world!
P.S. I really do want you to read Justin’s post; I mean, just consider this: [ … ] While the absolute volume of support tickets coming from LLM-born users isn’t significantly higher than the median, the shape of those tickets is off. To put it bluntly: a lot of the tickets we get are themselves LLM-generated. This is, frankly, extremely annoying —
and demoralizing for me and the team to spend half an hour meticulously answering some complex question only to receive a machine-generated reply in return.