The new funnel

Justin Duke writes:

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.