Why Everyone Is OBSESSED With Arc Browser

so it seems like everyone that is in the tech world or working in Tech is now ditching Chrome Safari or whatever their browser was for this new unknown browser called [Applause] Arc it's almost like this secret Club where if you see somebody else using Arc you go nice how is it possible that this browser comes out of nowhere keeps growing like crazy creates this almost cot like following and it's also completely free with no ads and no selling any data well looked under the curtain and once you understand the genius design choices and psychology behind it it all makes sense but there's another question are they completely hard than mind they have entered probably the most concentrated and difficult to conquer markeet in Tech casually competing against Apple and Google wow what an amazing day as a small startup and with a product that doesn't make a single sense and all while spending Millions to hire the best tech talent in a fancy mancy New York City headquarter so in this video we'll discover whether Arc strategy is genius or a very stupid and expensive idea I'm Aro I'm a product manager working in Tech and on this channel I go behind the scenes of the psychology and future of the tech products that we all use and there's a lot to unpack with Arc because Google Chrome is used by 63% of Internet users because it just works it has multiple tabs and innocent looking design it has extensions it has multiple profiles I mean if so many people are using it it's because it just works so if today I put you in charge of product at ARC and told you to build a browser what would you do if you notice there are a ton of browsers around and they all are a browser for something there's the browser for privacy there's the browser for crypto the browser for academic research and so on but the arc team chose to do something different they did the most difficult thing which is not building random extra feature on top of a familiar browser we all know but challenging the Assumption of how the most basic fundamental parts of a browser work and saying this to the way everybody has been doing things for the last 15 years you want to have multiple tabs of course so well you have tabs they're here it's so obvious well no this screens are horizontal and the most precious space is vertical space there's also so much free space on the sites of websites anyway so let's put all the tabs left use the internet to browse through websites well no this people actually spend most of their time on web apps not websites so we'll treat the browser like your home screen and like to keep up here your most used apps and for web apps you also get special thingies like calendar previews for Google Calendar a preview of your last emails for Gmail using the command bar for creating a new notion page people use their browser for work for personal use for multiple projects so Chrome has these little profiles click here and you got a new window well no this people switch all the time among multiple projects so we'll let you just swipe on your trackpad and scroll through spaces in the same window much easier and will'll also give give you this unnecessarily fancy Color Picker so you'll spend 1 hour tweaking the color of your browser so you can show it off to your friends this is the Ika effect it's when you assign more value and are more likely to use something that you have created or customized yourself it's the same psychological principle that notion uses you want to see multiple Pages at once so just take multiple windows and put them side by side well this why do you need separate Windows just split the screen inside the browser itself and with this you can also create split pre sets as well much better when you're looking at the results of a Google search you will probably open the first three or four results to see what's inside and know this why do you need to open the page when you can hover on the search results and get an AI summary for the page in just a few seconds you got the point I could go on forever with this and this is very cool but it brings another problem familiarity bias people are more likely to use things that they are familiar with why do you think old browsers basically look the same because they don't want to throw people off AR solve this with a crazy good onboarding sequence to get you set up and they even give you this cool personal card with your browser ID on it which again makes you feel part of the club but once you reach the actual browser this is where I think they can improve because there's just so much going on and it makes you feel kind of lost so to fix this what I would do is use Progressive disclosure making you discover the features of the browser one at a time open a new tab add it to favor create a new space just like video games do but there's another key thing that the arc team did and that was the genius growth strategy that allowed to grow such an obsessed Community they leverage on something that most software products don't use enough which is artificial scarcity this is a browser it's cold it doesn't cost anything to have an extra Pur to install it but for the first years of launching Arc they built a genius system where you could only join if you had an invite once you got the browser you waited for a while and then you get five invites to share with your friends and this does two things first it controls growth because actually to too much growth can be negative your team gets flooded by feature request and bugs and it's a mess but the other Advantage is building exclusivity and a sense of belonging back in 2014 I got the first OnePlus phone the OnePlus One and at the time they were also using a system where you needed invite to get the phone and after fighting so much for an invite to get it it felt more special now I know this all sounds like an advertisement for Ark and they are not sponsoring this video although if you're from the ark team and want to do something together my my is the description but to succeed there are also some things that they definitely need to improve on first is close platform the IOS app feels more like a companion than a real blowser you can really feel that it's not built as mobile first and then hello Windows Android then there's some things that are just okay like the loading indicator is pretty bad in my opinion like what does this mean come on you can use skeleton loading in the page use the tab as a loading indicator and I literally fought this in like 3 seconds and and then there's this thing which is just a lot of stuff and it scares me every time I look at it and it's a great example of a lack of hierarchy why do I have my downloads my old tabs some random notes and random media from who knows where all in the same list all in the same level of hierarchy but the biggest problem I have with Ark is that it's free there's no way you can give them money there's no paid plan or premium and they're not selling your data either at least that's what they're saying imagine you had a regular Rusty car and now they're this company that gives you electric cars for free yes the car might have some minor problems but who cares you would recommend this to everyone you haven't paid a sent for it this brings us to the big question mark for Arc how the hell do they plan to make money and just not die so let's do some math Arc is built by a company called the browser company cool name by the way according to LinkedIn they have 66 employees and thinking as a rough assumption software developer salary in New York City add a New York office for 50 people at 430k all Park cloud and software cost at $2 million per year they will be spending almost $12 million per year in cost and that doesn't even count the expensive AI features they just launched and their renue to support that is $0 and it's pretty normal for Silicon Valley startups to grow at a loss and then make money later but investors would like to at least know what's your plan to make money and from what they share in their updates looks like they have no clear Direction on how to monetize like cool cool cool but how are you going to make money and saying hey if you're working at a company how do we make it so the best way to work together is in Ark with Ark together if I had a predict I think boo are going to be a big part of our future we might do this we might do that it's still very unclear so up until now this strategy seems kind of Reckless and stupid but they have a secret weapon by their own admission they don't want to cater to everyone they built Arc for a specific crowd people working in tech people that are Tech heavy information workers and creatives I work in Tech and at my company good 50% of people use it whenever I see someone else coding at a cafe or around the city what are they using Ark the invite system is genius because they started getting invites out to tech people so what did these people do they give the invites out to other tech people so think of Instagram YouTube Spotify Tik Tok and all these platforms they want to make you spend the most amount of time possible on their platform and the genius thing about building a browser that's for people that work on their computer all day is that the browser is the piece of software that you spend the most amount of time on each week dozens and dozens of hours and the smartest ones amongst you will probably have figured out already why this is crazy powerful Arc now is a ton of people in a demographic that has high spending power also High influence in The Tax Scene and software industry that is worth billions of dollars Tik Tok and YouTube have billions of random people from all walks of life that spend an hour each day on them arc on the other hand as a niche user base but that on average is a lot more High earning and high influence and people are spending 10 hours a day on it now they haven't tapped into this power yet but for example here are three ways they could build an incredibly successful business with Arc without selling your data without ads and I would say in an ethical way the first is defaults and supported applications and in this way they could do some form of product placement they could have software products and web apps paid to be featured on Arc as the defaults or even embedded in the command bar where you can quickly do actions and they become much more integrated with your browser they could take this subscription route and with their Target demographic they can potentially get to charge quite a lot for such a good tool and follow the model of superhuman a premium email client that goes for more than $30 a month but they would need to be ultra careful in planning their free model and how they switch from free to paid and finally the fact that they are a browser they might enable a new kind of affiliate marketing model if I have a software product and it takes me $30 in marketing to acquire user I could actually put it on Arc in an app store of sorts and pay people to use my product for the first x amount of minutes and completing key actions like setting up their profile Arc can take some of their money so this is a win-win win for the user that gets money Arc that gets a part of that money and for the software company that now has acquired a new user but another product that just like Arc has been making people obsessed over it it's notion and I went behind the scenes of notion in this video right here

Channel: Enrico Tartarotti

Views: 252,260

Keywords: enrico tartarotti, enrico, tartarotti, enritarta, tech, chat gpt, openai, chatgpt, arc, arc browser, chrome alternative, the browser company, browser company, psychology of arc, arc review, arc switch, chrome alternatives, replace chrome, replace safari, notion psychology, enrico tartarotti notion

Id: UdopamaLJC8

Length: 10min 26sec (626 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 04 2023