Rise of the product marketplace

Social media individualized the content viewing experience. AI will do the same to the product experience.

Ever tried watching someone else’s TikTok feed? It’s horrible! Soon, spending five minutes on someone else’s food delivery app will feel just as jarring.

That’s because AI now makes it possible to create bespoke user experiences at scale. This transformation is only possible because AI is dramatically lowering the technological barrier to entry — before, you needed to know how to code and design, but now you can just tell AI what you want. If I eat Halal and paleo, my DoorDash never needs to show me anything else. Similarly, if I only want news that makes me happy, I never need to be upset by my feed again. We’re shifting from products designed to be “usable by everyone” to products that are “customizable by everyone.”

This creates new tensions. When users can infinitely customize their experience, creators lose visibility into how their products are actually being used. More fundamentally, it means an inherent tension in finding the balance between what creators want to curate and what users want to see.

But here’s where media organizations have an unexpected advantage: taste becomes the new differentiator.

In a world of infinite customization, users need starting points — templates that reflect a particular worldview or approach. Media creators must become half-influencer, half-builder, not just curating content but articulating why their curatorial perspective matters. Think I need to see more than happy news? You’ll have to show me why your view of the world is worth adopting. To succeed, organizations must embrace this tension: providing strong vision while enabling radical personalization.

This evolution points towards a third space between individualized and company-produced products: the Product Marketplace. Think user-generated MySpace templates or Snapchat filters, but for entire categories. We might even see a rise of “product influencers,” who influence through their particular way of filtering, presenting and using products. There’s something to borrow here from social media too — lookalike algorithms could suggest configurations: “Users with your preferences also enabled these sections.” The product marketplace creates a new economy, and also helps orgs unlock a key visibility problem: if we create a marketplace, we also get to see what’s worth scaling.