According to SimilarWeb, a website traffic analysis service, OpenAI's traffic, which shook the world with ChatGPT, has been decreasing by 10.35% every month since last May. While it initially attracted global attention and time due to its novelty and fun, it is a phenomenon that confirms the possibility of being quickly forgotten unless its essential role in life is clearly established. Of course, considering the decrease from the huge traffic figure of 1.8 billion and the flow of the era's paradigm of generative AI, this may not be a big issue in the future. However, it is necessary to confirm that no matter how excellent a service is, its relevance to users' lives determines its success.

The business that we look at is in the realm of personal choice and dedication for the entrepreneur. For example, Elon Musk, who recently changed Twitter's name to X, explained that he couldn't explain why, but he liked the letter X, and he made the decision to let the blue bird, a symbol of Twitter, fly out of its cage. His love for the letter X, which began in 1999 with his startup X.com, led to the claim of the name XPayPal during the merger with PayPal, which brought him his first major success. This love has extended to SpaceX, Tesla, and his vision for the super app X.

The important thing is that, like entrepreneurs, users' service experiences also begin on the basis of their own personal interests and needs. Mothers' grocery shopping and cooking are practices and expressions of dedication and love for their family, and the choice of the smallest and cheapest smart thermometer used to grill meat among various smart devices in the home is connected to warm relationships with those around them.

However, companies' interest in the mutual relationship between these products and services and users is very limited and not sustainable. Questions that arise from the initial product planning stage to meetings for subsequent marketing activities are mostly geared towards "what ideas are appropriate". There was a time when snack content dominated online. In the 2000s, Facebook, a platform where people around the world could connect online, emerged, and through this, content that was easily consumed and distributed began to be created. From BuzzFeed overseas to Pickycast in Korea, content with shallow and interesting topics became popular and drove the expansion of companies, but it has now been reduced or disappeared altogether. The influence that light content had on the public has diminished, and the public has become the host of media content after the emergence of TikTok and Instagram.

Christian Madsbjerg, the author of "Look," clearly stated that throughout his 20 years of consulting experience, it was not ideas but insights that led to client companies' innovation and overcoming crises. And he revealed that these insights can only be identified by observing both the foreground and the background that act behind it. He argues that the reason why companies that bring together highly skilled professionals in each field actually fail to make meaningful changes is "because they don't know how to discern what is important," and observation is the only and slow technique for understanding what is truly important to ourselves and others.

With big data and countless statistics pouring out, we are told what consumers are doing. Company leaders check large data sets that record what is happening outside to make countless micro and macro decisions, but no one asks how much attention they pay to what is not recorded in it. When checking who attended, no one asks who was absent and why, why some people chose to remain silent when one person speaks, and what people don't talk about in a situation where they are talking about new trends.

Discussing only the changes that are revealed and verifiable in a situation where ideas are pouring out only leads to short-term results, and it creates a distance from relevance that can no longer deepen. Therefore, the question, "What about this idea?", is often difficult to answer. The reason for the existence of human creativity discussed in the field of anthropology is for humans to lead others in the direction they want. If you are discussing ideas about products and services, I suggest that you continue to be interested in the background of other people beyond that. Sometimes, it is necessary to consider a change in the process, not what idea to focus on.

*This article is the original content published in the named column of the Electronic Times on August 21, 2023.

References

openai.com Traffic and Engagement Analysis

Twitter is now X. Here's what that means.

Why is Elon Musk obsessed with X?

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