Lenny’s Podcast132 min
Jason Feifer · Oct 12, 2023
Key learnings- Before pursuing press, define what you need it for, such as awareness, investor credibility, or a new customer segment, the same…
- Choose outlets whose readers can actually buy or use your product; a local business gains little from a national outlet, so…
- Study how a publication covers your category and competitors, then identify the specific writer or editor, since the…
Lenny’s Podcast118 min
Karri Saarinen · Oct 8, 2023
Key learnings- Ship features early to a small set of users or internal teammates and polish only at general release, rather than perfecting…
- Co-create early features with one or a few large customers to clarify how complex workflows should actually work.
- Give project teams ownership of their features; craft often emerges when engineers and designers discover better interaction…
Lenny’s Podcast104 min
Brian Balfour · Oct 5, 2023
Key learnings- Building a great product is necessary but not sufficient; durable winners separate themselves by building strong distribution…
- New distribution platforms tend to follow a cycle: competitive consensus, identifying a moat, opening a third-party ecosystem…
- Being early to a new platform matters because late adopters face shrinking windows, since platform cycles appear to be getting…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 195
Oct 3, 2023 · 33 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyPart six of Lenny Rachitsky's B2B startup series covers hiring an early team, organized around four questions: who to hire first, where to find people, how to persuade them to join, and when to bring on a salesperson…
Lenny’s Podcast104 min
Lane Shackleton · Oct 1, 2023
Key learnings- Treat the core job of product work as turning ambiguity into clarity, and build repeatable systems rather than chasing one-off…
- Build default-on customer contact systems, such as a standing weekly slot with customers, instead of quarterly OKRs to talk to…
- Ask career questions about how many 'oh shit' moments someone has had recently, a sharper signal of growth than asking whether…
Lenny’s Podcast101 min
Maya Prohovnik · Sep 28, 2023
Key learnings- Dogfood your product by creating content with it yourself, since building creator tools without living the creator experience…
- Ensure the team experiences the product's pain directly, for example by having engineers and PMs make their own podcasts, to…
- Balance data and gut instinct by treating your intuition as a legitimate data point, explaining its reasoning with evidence…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 336
Sep 26, 2023 · 15 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyLenny Rachitsky profiles how Linear, the project-management tool, builds its product, based on an interview with CEO Karri Saarinen. The post's core argument is that a small, craft-focused setup works well: no dedicated…
Lenny’s Podcast95 min
Nilan Peiris · Sep 24, 2023
Key learnings- Measure word of mouth by simply asking new customers how they heard about you and overlaying that on attribution and…
- Use NPS as a proxy for viral potential: moving promoters up the scale roughly doubles how many people each customer refers, so…
- Read the verbatim NPS comments company-wide; Wise found customers repeatedly asked for lower prices, faster transfers, and easier…
Lenny’s Podcast88 min
Itamar Gilad · Sep 21, 2023
Key learnings- Build product from evidence rather than opinion; a leader's conviction should be tested with customer data, interviews, and…
- Define clear, user-facing goals first, and map them with a metrics tree linking a North Star metric (value created for users) to…
- Use ICE (impact, confidence, ease) to score ideas, and be honest about confidence using the confidence meter: opinions and themes…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 402
Sep 19, 2023 · 22 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyA guest post by former Amazon executive Ethan Evans introducing the Magic Loop, a five-step cycle for growing your career by doing your current job well, offering help to your manager, and asking for work tied to your…
Lenny’s Podcast110 min
Christopher Lochhead · Sep 17, 2023
Key learnings- Most businesses unknowingly choose to compete for a slice of an existing category; Lochhead argues category leaders capture about…
- Focus obsessively on the customer's problem, not just your solution, as Gojo did when it reframed hand washing without water to…
- Use new language (languaging) to change how people think about a problem, so they can perceive new value and be open to a new…
Lenny’s Podcast88 min
Oji Udezue · Sep 14, 2023
Key learnings- Map B2B SaaS opportunities on two axes: how many departments a workflow touches and how frequently it runs; high-frequency niche…
- Confirm a problem is sharp by drawing customer workflows before and after your product and measuring how much shorter they…
- Products must be noticeably better than the status quo, roughly three times faster or more capable, before customers will switch…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 327
Sep 12, 2023 · 35 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyPart five of a B2B startup series argues there is no formula for product-market fit, but founders' stories reveal a pattern. It proposes a five-step progression from one loving customer, to a paying customer, to…
Lenny’s Newsletter · Free post♥ 1,607
Sep 11, 2023 · 11 min
“This week the newsletter hit 500,000 subscribers, which I’m told makes it among the top five largest newsletters on Substack and one of the largest newsletters broadly. Friggin’ bonkers. A big round number is a good time to reflect, so I’ve collected some lessons from my journey. I still only sort of know what I’m doing, and it’s unclear where this all goes, but if you’re thinking about embarking on a writing journey, or are just…”
Lenny’s Podcast86 min
Andy Johns · Sep 10, 2023
Key learnings- Treat persistent disruption to sleep, relationships, physical health, and daily routines as a clear signal that something needs…
- Recognize that many high achievers tie self-worth to achievement; identify those adaptations that once helped you but may now be…
- Start with a therapist or counselor, and choose based on feeling safe and comfortable, ideally with someone intellectually at…
Lenny’s Podcast134 min
Claire Butler · Sep 7, 2023
Key learnings- Focus go-to-market on the individual contributors who use your product daily; their love and advocacy spread the product into…
- Keep the free tier generous, such as unlimited collaborators on a starter team, so teams can adopt and build confidence before…
- Early on, treat metrics as weak signal; look for a few users who love the product and are excited to play with it, rather than…
Lenny’s Newsletter · Free post♥ 223
Sep 5, 2023 · 29 min
Lenny Rachitsky's fourth installment in his B2B startup series argues that finding your first ten customers starts with trust and hand-to-hand effort, not scalable channels. Drawing on interviews with founders of…
Lenny’s Podcast90 min
Tim Holley · Sep 3, 2023
Key learnings- Make one north-star KPI, such as gross merchandise sales, the drumbeat of every meeting and the yardstick for judging launches.
- Repeat the company narrative relentlessly; Tim suggests people need to hear it several more times than you'd expect before they…
- Benchmark against the broader set of places buyers spend money, not just direct marketplace competitors, to ground prioritization…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 294
Aug 29, 2023 · 29 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyPart three of Lenny Rachitsky's B2B series argues that founders should define their ideal customer profile early, alongside the problem itself. Drawing on interviews with dozens of startup leaders, it outlines a list of…
Lenny’s Podcast99 min
Meltem Kuran · Aug 27, 2023
Key learnings- Start growth with cheap channels: monitor communities like Reddit, Quora, and Twitter for people asking questions you can answer…
- Before spending on paid ads, make sure the fundamentals work: a fast website, discoverability in search engines, and clear…
- For SEO, aim for content that fully answers the search so users don't need to return to Google; avoid keyword stuffing and…
Lenny’s Podcast94 min
Bob Moesta · Aug 24, 2023
Key learnings- Customers hire products to make progress in a context; understanding the context and desired outcome matters more than simply…
- Start from the struggling moment that causes demand, since a product alone does not create demand; use those moments to guide…
- Model switching as forces: push and pull drive change, while anxiety of the new and habit of the present hold people back, and…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 112
Aug 22, 2023 · 17 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyThe post offers a step-by-step guide to hiring and structuring a first growth team, drawing on interviews with a dozen growth practitioners. It argues growth should follow product-market fit, that acquisition is usually…
Lenny’s Podcast80 min
Camille Hearst · Aug 20, 2023
Key learnings- Creators often undervalue their work and avoid charging fans, but a fair value exchange is needed for creators to make a…
- Subscription revenue creates a 'hamster wheel' where creators feel locked into constant output, so platforms should consider…
- Early creators benefit from consistent, predictable publishing of quality work over time, which Camille has seen as a top success…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 306
Aug 15, 2023 · 37 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyPart two of a B2B startup series examines how founders validate an idea before committing. Drawing on interviews with about two dozen companies, it lays out four validation paths (manual, listening, prototype with…
Lenny’s Podcast114 min
Austin Hay · Aug 13, 2023
Key learnings- MarTech treats the marketing systems and platforms, both third-party and first-party, as products, and centers on people and…
- A dedicated systems or MarTech owner usually becomes necessary somewhere around 100 to 150 people, when a village approach to…
- Pick tools to solve specific problems, and combine buying a tool for most of the solution with building the remaining custom…
Lenny’s Podcast114 min
Christopher Miller · Aug 10, 2023
Key learnings- Take ownership of problems nobody has claimed; a radical accountability mindset can surface opportunities the business hasn't…
- Prioritize relentless curiosity and resilience when hiring or growing as a PM, since most growth experiments fail and you need…
- Talk directly to customers and to non-customers; usage data shows what users do, but only qualitative conversations reveal why.
Lenny’s Newsletter · Free post♥ 495
Aug 8, 2023 · 40 min
Lenny Rachitsky opens a seven-part B2B startup playbook by examining how successful B2B companies found their original ideas. Drawing on dozens of founder interviews, he argues that a strong B2B idea combines an…
Lenny’s Podcast92 min
Geoff Charles · Aug 6, 2023
Key learnings- Keep small teams single-threaded on one goal and shield them from distractions, using protective layers like production engineers…
- Align on goals, hypotheses, and data before debating solutions; empowerment works when leaders share context rather than…
- Pair velocity with control mechanisms such as tracking NPS, CSAT, operational burden, and customer confusion tickets, and pause…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 229
Aug 1, 2023 · 13 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyLenny Rachitsky, with OpenView and Pendo, benchmarks free-to-paid conversion from a survey of 1,000+ products, defining good and great rates for freemium, sales-assisted, and free-trial models. It argues conversion…
Lenny’s Podcast96 min
Ronny Kohavi · Jul 27, 2023
Key learnings- Test every code change, since even small bug fixes or tiny UI tweaks can have surprising, large impact on key metrics.
- Expect most ideas to fail: roughly two-thirds to over 90% of experiments in his experience did not move the target metric, so…
- Allocate a portion of experiments to high-risk, high-reward bets, accepting that about 80% will fail, while keeping most work…