Skyler Windmiller

The news dropped yesterday: OpenAI is shutting down Sora, their AI video app, six months after launch. The Disney $1B deal is off, and the API is going away, too.

The arc is fascinating if you zoom out. The app launched in September 2025, hit the top of the App Store within a day, and reached 1M downloads faster than ChatGPT did. By January, downloads had dropped 45%, and the whole thing had made roughly $2.1M in in-app purchases over its lifetime.

PLG was the backbone of some of the fastest-growing companies in history.

Slack grew by making team invites frictionless. Dropbox gave you free storage for every referral. Zoom let you host 40-minute meetings without a credit card. Those models worked because reducing friction was enough.

Road to 1,000,000 #Votap users Day 57 | Current: 1286