The CQ | Over Half of Consumers Now Use Prosumer Software in Their Personal Lives

Plus the Forerunner Team's Must-Reads of the Week

The CQ is Forerunner’s weekly newsletter rounding up the top consumer news, plus bonus musings from our investment team and portfolio highlights. Subscribe to get the latest each weekend.

By Jason Bornstein, Partner and Head of Research

The Prosumer market has exploded in mind share (and market share) over the last 10 years. Alongside Waymo, WhatsApp, DoorDash, consumers have Notion, Lovable, ChatGPT, and Slack on their phones, all of which straddle the lines between personal and professional.

We wanted to put Prosumer category to the test by analzying a wide range of public and private prosumer companies, making up a now $90-120B market.

Some highlights:

• Prosumer companies match Consumer Tech performance at IPO

• New AI-powered prosumer companies already show 3x higher consumer willingness to pay ($78 vs $25 median price point)

• Over half of consumers use prosumer software in their personal lives — Slack for neighborhood groups and parenting networks Notion for recipe tracking, Canva for wedding invitations.

See our full report for the analysis on Prosumer business performance, new up-and-comers, common business plateaus, and our new Prosumer Scorecard for evaluating these companies across eight of the most critical factors.

What We’re Talking About on Slack:

1. The Wall Street Journal looks at the lengths Americans are willing to go to make every penny count. Consumers are trying to combat rising costs by diluting soaps, skimping on detergent, growing produce, or buying in bulk or from Facebook Marketplace. Household spending cuts are showing up in corporate earnings—Procter & Gamble reported a 2% volume decline in its home and fabric-care division, which includes Tide, Dawn, and Swiffer, however private-label brands that make generic products haven’t seen an increase, which suggests consumers aren’t switching to cheaper brands, but stretching out what they already own.

2. Women’s pay is falling behind. Is the return to the office to blame? According to the Census Bureau, full-time women workers earn 81 cents for every dollar earned by men in 2024, the widest pay gap since 2016. After decades of progress narrowing the gender pay gap, women’s full-time earnings fell from 84 cents to less than 83 cents per dollar between 2022 and 2024, as men’s wages rose 3.7%. Economists link this setback partly to return-to-office mandates, which disproportionately push women to quit or accept lower-paying, flexible jobs amid the struggle to find affordable childcare. Workforce participation among women with young children and college degrees has fallen 2.3 percentage points since early 2023, while it has risen nearly 1 point for women without children. Research shows women are nearly three times more likely than men to leave jobs in tech or finance after office-return policies, underscoring how flexibility trade-offs widen the gender pay divide.

3. Gen X spends more money in stores and online than other generations. Why don’t retailers notice? Gen X represents only 19% of the U.S. population but drives a disproportionate 31% of all in-person and online spending, according to a new ICSC report. The generation accounts for nearly one-third of all restaurant spending and spends more per shopper across retail categories than baby boomers, millennials, or Gen Z. They are highly brand loyal, with 81% saying they stick with the brands they trust, and 92% use social media daily—yet only 5% of brand marketing targets them. With one in three Gen Xers expecting to inherit wealth totaling about $308 billion annually, their overlooked spending power positions them as a major near-term growth opportunity for retailers. “Gen X is pragmatic, loyal to brands they trust, and influential decision-makers for themselves, their children, and their parents. For retailers, there is no bigger near-term growth opportunity than winning the loyalty and the dollars of Gen X.”

4. The age of de-skilling: Concerns about the erosion of human abilities due to reliance on AI are growing as more research comes out showing that technology use can dull critical thinking. In one study, heavy AI users scored lower on standard critical-thinking tests, and in another, physicians’ polyp detection dropped by six percentage points after using AI tools for three months, though overall detection rose 20% when human and AI collaboration was measured together. Experts note that de-skilling isn’t new: Writing once replaced oral memory, calculators replaced manual math, and automation has shifted workers from hands-on expertise to screen supervision. The key question, researchers argue, is how to preserve essential human skills, like judgment, imagination, and empathy, while learning to think effectively alongside AI. “What might vanish is the tacit, embodied knowledge that underwrites our everyday discernment. If people were to learn to frame questions the way the system prefers them, to choose from its menu of plausible replies, the damage wouldn’t take the form of spectacular failures of judgment so much as a gradual attenuation of our character: shallower conversation, a reduced appetite for ambiguity, a drift toward automatic phrasing where once we would have searched for the right word, the quiet substitution of fluency for understanding. To offload those faculties would be, in effect, to offload ourselves. Losing them wouldn’t simply change how we work; it would change who we are.”

5. Meet the real screen addicts: the elderly. The Economist reports that those over 65 spend more than three hours a day online and over five and a half hours daily watching TV. Once slow to digital adoption, older adults now own more tablets, smart TVs, and e-readers than under-25s, 17% possess a smartwatch, and nearly a fifth of 55- to 64-year-olds own a game console. “Free time, immobility, and isolation are a recipe for spending hours in front of a screen.”

6. America is sliding toward illiteracy. Over the past decade, national test scores have fallen to their lowest levels in 25 years, and progress in reading and math has reversed after years of steady gains. Test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that 33% of eighth graders and 40% of fourth graders read “below basic,” while the average ACT score dropped to 19.4, the lowest since 1990. Learning losses are concentrated among the weakest students: The bottom tenth of 13-year-olds now score lower in reading and math than at any time since 1971 and 1978, and achievement gaps have widened in 49 of 50 states. Increased spending—from $14,000 to over $16,000 per student between 2012 and 2022 and an additional $190 billion in pandemic relief—failed to improve outcomes. Mississippi and Louisiana produced the only notable gains nationwide, by requiring that third graders pass a literacy exam to be promoted to the next grade, screening kids for reading deficiencies, and training teachers in phonics. “A clear policy story is behind these improvements: imposing high standards while also giving schools the resources they needed to meet them.”

7. The Atlantic on the parental-happiness fallacy: A Pew Research Center survey from a couple of years ago found that lower-income parents were more likely than middle- or higher-income parents to say they found parenting enjoyable and rewarding all or most of the time. The finding that women with the most advantages were the unhappiest became a talking point—even though the differences among the classes were small. Another finding from the survey was mostly ignored; it showed that lower-income parents are more likely than those with higher incomes to say parenting is stressful all or most of the time—they’re more worried about their children’s safety and mental health and by a large margin. Data from the Institute for Family Studies backs up that overall life satisfaction among mothers rises in step with income, contradicting claims that affluent mothers are the unhappiest. Other studies show that highly educated mothers experience more stress and less enjoyment during child-related activities, probably due to the social and logistical pressures of “intensive parenting.” All in all, it’s safe to say parents’ feelings about parenting are complex. “No amount of money can buy an American parent out of the reality that they will have to raise kids capable of surviving without much of a social safety net. The conclusion to draw from the struggles of well-off moms is not that they have it harder than other parents or that they’re putting a ridiculous amount of pressure on themselves, but that all parents would benefit from more robust family-friendly policies.”

8. New housing options emerge for older Americans. About 75% of adults aged 50 and older want to stay in their homes as they age, but rising housing costs, upkeep, and health issues often make that difficult. Many older adults are turning to alternative living arrangements that are more affordable and offer a mix of companionship and independence. Around 990,000 older adults were living with unrelated housemates in 2023, an 8.8% increase since 2021 and more than double the number two decades ago. There are currently about 150 cohousing communities in North America, with many catering to older adults. The share of Americans living in multigenerational households has also grown from 7% in 1971 to 18% in 2021, and builders like Lennar are responding with “home within a home” models that offer separate living spaces for family members. By 2030, one in five U.S. residents will be 65 or older, so there’s an increasing demand for nontraditional options such as home sharing, cohousing, and multigenerational designs.

Portfolio Highlights:

• Axios gives a rundown of Wonder’s expansion plans.

• TechCrunch and The Verge report that Oura is launching a redesigned app and a “Cumulative Stress” feature.

• Jump, the fan experience platform powering live events in sports, launched as the official partner of the Minnesota Timberwolves at Target Center

• Liftoff launched out of stealth as the only scalable, network-based approach to hiring that maintains a human touch.

Job of the Week:

Senior Director of Analytics at The Farmer’s Dog

See here for the ~2,600 other open roles at Forerunner portfolio companies