Week 35. Not the moat I thought.
Welcome to this Week 35 edition! I will mostly cover topics around AI.
What is going on with ChatGPT referral traffic?
Following GPT-5 release, there's been an unprecedented amount of scepticism. At which point Sam Altman agreed to give users the choice between version 5 and 4.
I’ve been impressed by how Tally grew with signups coming from ChatGPT referral traffic. I like this build in public phase because most studies on AI usage and traffic come from third parties. Here the data is direct, so it gives a good picture of what is really going on.
Comments were a pleasure to read since it was no-bullshit 😏 and an interesting data point (graph initially shared by OpenAI) showed a significant decrease in usage but Marie Martens (Tally co-founder) explained that they "had the best months during summer and it only slowed down a couple of weeks ago".
Both graphs don't correlate and the signups drop seems to directly be correlated to GPT5 release.
Acquisition through LLMs is still very uncertain. My advice would be to wait until there's less volatility before (really) integrating LLMs into your growth strategy.
Read Marie Martens LinkedIn post
Apple M&A team shifts from its historically conservative posture
Back in the 2025 strategy doc leaked during Google’s DOJ, I tried to guess what ChatGPT moats could be. One of my guesses was OpenAI partnering with Apple to replace Google as the default search engine on Safari. Looking back, it doesn’t make sense. Sam Altman and the OpenAI team keep saying ChatGPT is for “good” questions so not for checking your basketball team’s live score.
Now according to Reuters, Apple’s M&A team is in talks with Perplexity and Mistral. If it happens, it would mainly be to catch up on AI, not to directly integrate into Safari (at least not for now).
Apple internally discussed buying Mistral, Perplexity
- Apple’s M&A strategy focuses on small startup acquisitions, valuing technical talent rather than revenue.
- Past acquisitions led to features such as Touch ID, Siri, Shortcuts, and Apple News+.
🍿Snacks
Do you mind more tariffs? Trump’s basically saying: if other countries tax U.S. tech companies, he’ll hit them back with tariffs. Meta's Zuckerberg pressed Trump on digital taxes before tariff threat, Bloomberg News reports.
Owning data. Nice and transparent deep dive from Simon Heaton (Buffer's Director of Growth) into how Buffer built its marketing analytics stack. From Client-Side Chaos to Server-Side Clarity.
Share it with your Design team. Greg Makrigiorgos (Associate Creative Director at Plaid) (screen) shares how he uses a customGPT to reduce the time for reviewing content in Figma files. How a top copywriter uses ChatGPT to automate Content Design process.
See you next week,
Alice
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