Your Product Shadow

Digital Twins for SaaS

👋 Hi, Jay here! Welcome to my newsletter on Substack, exclusively for Product Coalition members.

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Here’s what I’m covering this week

1. 🤔 EVENT: A.I. LIVE EVENT DAY - 3 SPECIAL EVENTS FRIDAY

2. 🗒️ STUDY WITH JAY: Digital Twins

3. 🎧 PODCAST: EP67 Breaking Blockchain Barriers

4. 📝 COMMUNITY ARTICLE: The Puppet Master Without Strings: How I Learned to Influence

5. 👉 OPEN TO WORK

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A.I. LIVE EVENT DAY - 3 SPECIAL EVENTS

🤔 Want your own live event to elevate your professional profile to 15k LinkedIn followers? Subscribe as a Premium Member! More details here.

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STUDY WITH JAY: Product Shadow Powers

🗒️ Each week I share what I’m studying, with the world. This week I’m studying digital twins and the opportunity for SaaS.

Last month, I was having a virtual coffee with Sara, the CTO of a rapidly growing SaaS platform. "You know what saved us last month?" she asked, stirring her flat white. "Our digital twin spotted a potential system collapse before any alarms went off. Saved us from what would have been a nightmare."

Now, if you're thinking digital twins are just for factories and fancy manufacturing plants, you're in for a treat. The software world has taken this concept and turned it into something rather brilliant for SaaS platforms. Mind you, getting it right isn't exactly a walk in the park, but the payoff is worth every bit of effort.

Let me share what I've learned from chatting with some SaaS product people who have or are setting up digital twins, and why this matters more than ever for your business.

The Real Deal About SaaS Digital Twins

Think of a digital twin as your platform's stunt double. While your actual system handles the day-to-day operations, its twin runs scenarios, spots potential issues, and gives you insights you never knew you needed. Matterport's been doing incredible things with this technology, creating digital replicas that do more than just look pretty – they provide actionable insights that make proper business sense.

AWS IoT TwinMaker has made this technology more accessible than ever. One of my contacts, a logistics software provider, used it to model their entire distribution stack. Within three months, they'd found inefficiencies that were costing them thousands. Pretty clever stuff.

A Proper History Lesson (But the Interesting Kind)

Apollo 13 transcript