Who actually uses these products,
and what made them stay.

The QuickBooks Small Business Owner

A small business owner — a contractor, consultant, retailer, or service business — doing their own bookkeeping in QuickBooks because they can't yet justify what an accountant costs. They are not a numbers person by nature. They are running QuickBooks because they were told they had to, not because they wanted to. They feel mild anxiety every time they open it and have not reconciled their accounts in two months.

“Not a single dramatic moment — more like a Tuesday at 3pm when they realized they hadn't thought about transactions that categorize wrong and silently corrupt their books in two weeks.”

The Perplexity AI-Native Searcher

A researcher, analyst, consultant, or curious professional who started using Perplexity for quick lookups and gradually shifted most of their search behavior to it. They value citations. They appreciate the synthesized answer more than a list of links they have to open and read. They trust it for most things. They verify independently for decisions where being wrong has consequences. They've tried to explain why they prefer it to people who use Google and have not fully succeeded because the difference is in the feel of the first answer, which doesn't translate to a verbal description.

“It happened mid-workflow — they're researching a niche regulatory question for a client: the current status of SEC rules around.”