👉 Background: Block is the company that was previously known as Square. It’s the company founded by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. And it’s also the company that acquired Afterpay for a whopping $39 billion in scrip in 2021.

👉 What happened: Now, Block has announced a revenue increase to $4.65 billion USD, which is up 14% from a year before. And gross profit of $1.66bn USD. One of the big contributors was Afterpay - which generated over $264m USD in revenue for the quarter.

👉 What else: And Block reckons that integrating Afterpay as a feature into its Cash app product is just the very beginning. So Afterpay has really shifted from product to feature.

What's the key learning?

💡Whether you are a feature or a product can literally determine the fate of your business. TLDR: Features and products are different sides of the same coin.

• Features are all the small parts of the product that make it hum (think: user interface, navigation, push notifications).
• All of these mini-features together make up a product.

💡But if your business is just a feature, it can be replicated by a larger company as part of their larger product.

💡The famous example is when Steve Jobs called Dropbox a feature back in 2009. While Dropbox is considered a product to many, Dropbox could just be a feature like iCloud within the Apple ecosystem. And now, it’s clear that Afterpay is playing its role as a key feature within the broader Square ecosystem.

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