Have you worried about disruptive technology rendering your product obsolete? If so, you’re not alone. Here’s a more constructive approach.

When disruptive technology is invented we sometimes freakout that it may send shockwaves through our industry or render our product obsolete. 

Here’s why that fear is often overblown and how you should respond instead.

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Episode Transcript
Hey, folks, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is the approach you should be taking if and when any new technology is ever developed which is looking like it may severely disrupt either your product or your industry.

Now, my motivation for wanting to talk about this topic comes from all of the buzz surrounding Chat GPT. And a lot of conversation and dialogue is about how it’s going to change things dramatically.

What is it going to make obsolete?

Our author is no longer going to be a thing.

Our artists no longer going to be a thing.

There’s all kinds of dialogue going on about the major hugely disruptive changes that may take place because of this technology.

Now, the first thing I’ll say is that technology isn’t technically new. It’s been around for years, they’ve been working on refining it for years. But more recently, I would argue that the adoption is significantly more widespread because people are really starting to adopt it and come up with creative new use cases in terms of how they may leverage it in order to make their lives better, create more value, save more time, whatever it is.

People are figuring out what those use cases are and OpenAI company that owns Chat GPT is really studying and evaluating that. They’re doing the research and putting in the time to figure out how they’re going to ultimately position it in order to figure out where it generates the most value for the most people, because that speaks to opportunity.

But having said that, the sentiment that I’m hearing in a lot of ways is some of it’s doom and gloom, right?

And I get it right, video killed the radio star or whatever, right?

A bunch of examples like that. The thing that’s often not told is how any of the individuals that were in, for example, radio, in that example that I just shared, had evolved from there as the new technology became available. And there was plenty of that.

And that’s really what I want to speak to in terms of the strategy that you should be leveraging in order to ensure that what it is you’re working on can be preserved or ultimately upgrade it in a significant way with the help of this new technology.

So you shouldn’t see it necessarily as a foe in all these instances. What I’d rather have you do is study it so that you can better understand how you may be able to incorporate it in whatever it is that you’re working on because it may speak to an opportunity to actually improve your value proposition. And in order to make this strategy sound even a little bit more convincing, what I want to do is I want to share with you an example from one of my own product companies, which is called Podcast Chef, how we leverage this strategy in order to improve our value proposition as the industry evolved, as new technology became available.

So, if you’re unfamiliar, my product company, Podcast Chef, which is a productized service, essentially helps people that are selling higher ticket services in the B to B world open doors with who ultimately could become a major client by instead of going directly at them with a pitch, which no one likes to be sold to, especially in that way if you don’t have some form of existing relationship, but instead invite them to be a guest on your podcast, because that’s a great way to kind of open a door and start building a relationship. Plus you’ve got the opportunity to invest in it and create a bunch of organic content at the same time, a whole bunch of value, specifically speaking to the Podcast Chef current value proposition.

However, having said that, at the time when digital shorts like some of the content that I’ve been creating and sharing on YouTube as well too, and across other platforms, really started to become very popular and start to gain a lot of traction in the mainstream. A lot of these platforms like YouTube were really promoting this short form digital video content. We didn’t originally have that as part of our core process and we were wondering, is that something that’s going to disrupt podcasting?

Like what’s going to happen to podcasting?

So we had some of the same questions that you may have now in terms of how chat GPT may be disrupting your product, making it obsolete or whatever.

Is the technology going to disrupt your product? Is the technology going to disrupt your industry, and if so, how severely? Right? So we were having the same type of conversations about what digital shorts were going to do to our productized service, Podcast Chef.

Now, instead of freaking out and panicking and doing anything pretty significantly that was potentially irrational or whatever, what we did was we studied digital shorts to better understand what value they could add and if they could actually be incorporated in what we were already doing to even make it better.

Did that make sense?

And long story short, it did.

So what we were doing at the time was we were encouraging people when they were recording podcasts to do so in video, and then when they had an opportunity to ultimately promote the video in addition to the audio, we would do that for them as well too. So that was already making its way to YouTube, but we weren’t really focusing on it so much.

So now when digital shorts gained a lot of popularity and traction, we saw that as a potential lever we could incorporate in order to help our clients shows grow more significantly, and that’s pretty much what we looked to do.

So we figured out how to take the video content, chop it up into a bunch of shorts and share it across the world.

Now, that isn’t something that’s particularly unique right now. That’s something we’ve been doing for quite a while, but that’s how we handled a major disruption to our industry based on what was going on social media wise and content wise, and what was being promoted at the time, and to potentially figure out how it might disrupt what we were doing. A podcast, Chef.

So, having said that, that’s really the approach that I want you to take is I want you to look at new technology from the perspective of what is it, how do I better understand it, how do I and then how might you be able to leverage it? As in, can your product incorporate any new technology into your process to receive some of the benefits of the faster, cheaper, easier stuff that new technology often provides in order to actually strengthen your value proposition?

If you take that approach, then all of a sudden, any new technology or any major disruptive changes really aren’t all that scary, and in fact, they become more exciting.

What is exciting for us at Podcast Chef is incorporating that into our process has made our value proposition stronger. Because now we don’t just have the ability to open doors, we have the ability to grow shows in a great way as well, too, in a much shorter period of time. And digital shorts have helped us do that once we incorporate it into our routine.

So I wanted to make sure that you were aware the approach that I’d recommend you take when it comes to new technology and how it may be disruptive, but it could be disruptive in a good way if you’re thinking about it this way.