Grey hat deepfakes 🦾 & the long-term solution for short-term problems 🧩

Good morning,

Jay-Z vs deepfakes, Segment on the long-term solution for short-term problems, a letter from Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky & 50% off of Revue if you’re in health or science. Here’s your weekly GrowthPulse.

Do you enjoy this newsletter? Consider sending the archive to fellow growth marketers, data analysts and product managers! 😁

A few weeks ago Jay-Z’s label Roc Nation tried to take down a video on YouTube. This video was a deepfaked audio recording of Jay-Z reciting a Shakespeare monologue and a Billy Joel song. Google initially took down the video, but then Google decided that Roc Nation’s takedown requests were incomplete. Google cited that: ‘The YouTuber labeled audio clips to indicate they’re synthetic speech.’

While it’s astonishing to me that they audio actually sounds like Jay-Z’s distinctive voice, it also opens up to a weird opportunity.

If an individual can replicate Jay-Z’s voice and can get away with it, you can do it too. If you should is another question, but hey, that one’s up to you. A 2-minute Google search revealed that there are many deepfake audio tools out there. Upload a 1-3 hour video of a voice you want to mimic and this SDK let’s you play with it.

We all know that retention is a tough cookie to crack, but also one that ensures your company has a future. With saturated ad platforms, rising CACs and the level of competition the need of basic level retention is critical to survive.

Segment wrote a good article on how to track early warning signs. It’s definitely not new information, but sometimes a bit of inspiration can bring you quite far.

I would include a data scientist from day 0 to help you with the analysis and to get a solid understanding of your challenges. From there onwards analyse your product improvements against subsequent cohorts to measure short-term solutions and the long-term impact on your improvements.

I’ll close this weeks GrowthPulse with the letter that Brian Chesky send to his staff. To let go a big % of your staff is one of the toughest decisions to make if you heading a company. For that one tough decision are a dozen of possible - and most of the time - not pretty endings. The direction that Airbnb chose is memorable. How they go to great lengths to ensure their teammates end up well is inspiring to say the least.

With that said this GrowthPulse is coming to an end. I wish you a safe and lovely weekend.

See you next week!!

Gino 🤙🏽