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

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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.