They never made sense long term, of course. But, plenty of first movers made a bundle of money making chatgpt wrappers and marketing the hell out of them. In that context, they probably made sense for a small subset of people for a small slice of time.
Yeah none of them ever did, and that was always very obvious. If you can make it by wrapping a few API calls, you have no moat and anyone can steal your idea/customers.
Even if you're doing something with strong network effects you've got to consider cases like facebook which weren't first movers in markets where there are super strong network effects and yet still won. You're not really going to have a 'community' based moat for PDF analyzer tool #5 or retrieval augmented generation knowledgebase parser #300. You're not gonna have a moat based on much else either...
Conversion.ai / Jarvis.ai / Jasper.ai / whatever they’re called today raised $125M at a $1.5b valuation, so it made sense at some point to some people.
1) Jasper isn’t exactly what I’d call “thin.” It has e.g. an entire project management suite inside it now. They moved very fast into a vertical SaaS platform, probably because they knew that a thin wrapper was neither a particularly good product nor a defensible one.
2) There are tons of actually thin wrappers that raised a ton of money — contrary to popular belief this does not mean they are good businesses (Jasper, AFAICT, doesn’t seem to fall into the categories of either “thin wrapper” or bad business)
3) Obviously anything being called out as not making any sense allegedly “made sense” to some people at some point otherwise it wouldn’t be worth talking about.
Jasper was cited in a recent TechCrunch article about the obvious vulnerability of the API wrapper startup business model. I guess we could argue at length about the thickness of the wrapper, but that seems unproductive.
