Gokul Rajaram explaining the difference between dashboard product and pipes product, and why it is important to identify early on which product are you are working on.
Every startup needs to make a choice: is their product a dashboard product or a pipes product?
Dashboard products are used directly and regularly by end users as their primary interface for accomplishing tasks. The goal for these products is to get customers to live in the product. The primary North Star metric for these companies is active users (daily / weekly / monthly, depending on the natural frequency of customer usage for the category). Facebook’s first product (aka Facebook :)) was a dashboard product.
Pipes products are used in the background to process transactions, data, payments, etc, and customers rarely interact with them directly after initial setup. The goal for these products is to for their customers to send as much of their data / payments / etc through them. Their North Star metrics is a volume metric (eg GPV). Databricks’ core product is a pipes product.
Companies can have both types of products in their portfolio. For example, ChatGPT is a dashboard product while OpenAI’s APIs are a pipes product. However, a given product has to determine which camp it’s primarily in.
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