Dragoncatcher: The new funnel

Large language models are now driving significant user growth for online services, with Buttondown attributing its recent spike in subscriptions to LLM referrals and Fat Gold reporting its first-ever subscription referrals from AI tools like Claude. The trend has created a new customer acquisition channel, though Buttondown's founder notes that support tickets from LLM-born users are increasingly themselves generated by AI, creating a frustrating cycle for human support teams.

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 https://www.jmduke.com/posts/llm-born.html?utm source=Robin Sloan sent me , so I recommend clicking over to read it. I can add, anecdotally, that in Q1 of this year, Fat Gold https://fat.gold?utm source=Robin Sloan sent me 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 https://www.jmduke.com/posts/llm-born.html?utm source=Robin Sloan sent me ; 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. To the blog home page /lab/