Well, this must be quietly pissing off a lot of people. But I just can’t fade Higgsfield. They ship very fast and they’re the best in marketing in our GenAI creative industry. The entire industry is trying to catch up to them and they only arrived onto the GenAI space in earnest a year ago. Before that, they were still in pre-PMF stage. It is very impressive progress.
This reminds me of other early cycles in tech, including ride sharing, group buying, ecommerce, and early social media. Each phase was accompanied with massive marketing spend and tactics: Uber with their creative marketing and bullying and acquisitions, Groupon with aggressive marketing spend, copying, and competition, Amazon vs http://Diapers.com, and Facebook vs everyone.
In this case, it’s like if Lyft arrived onto the scene a year later and beat Uber at marketing. Just a year and a half ago, it was Runway, Luma, Midjourney, and a few others who mainly dominated the conversation.
But the mechanics here are different from these previous cycles. Higgsfield is reselling new models (Seedance mainly, today) while also trying to ship features, new UI, and API all at the same time. That’s to win both consumer and enterprise GenAI markets. They have to win over the casual consumer, the marketing person, and the executive. And on top of that, there’s less acquisition potential. Facebook acquiring Instagram makes sense because that’s a new interface with new users/demographics locked into a network effect on photo sharing. GenAI customers are much more disloyal and network effects aren’t as sticky. The value then accrues to who can maintain mindshare and brand recognition.
It makes sense that Nvidia is investing in Higgsfield because their thing is getting more people to spend money on tokens, which thereby sells more GPUs. Higgsfield is spending boatloads of money to create a new market, very similar to what Uber and Groupon were doing in their early cycles. Their marketing dollars essentially created the demand for a new service that is now commonplace. Nvidia wants everyone to be using AI everyday. Why not fund the biggest marketer in the space to accelerate that?
