Colin Matthews explains that ChatGPT apps let third-party tools surface interactive widgets inside conversations, creating a potentially major distribution channel. The post covers how users discover apps contextually…
““French fries and buffalo wings are the most difficult problem in the restaurant delivery industry today. We are obsessed with challenging ourselves to consistently deliver them hot and crispy.” — Micah Moreau (VP Growth, DoorDash) Welcome to the second-to-last 😳 post of my eight-part limited series on kickstarting and scaling a marketplace business. In this post, I’ll share the top ten strategies that today’s biggest marketplace…”
Melissa Perri shares advice gathered from experienced operators on what product leaders should prioritize during the COVID-19 crisis. Her core argument is that survival comes first: preserve cash, shift the roadmap…
Grailed's Discovery team spent eight months building a curated feed that barely moved the business. After adopting continuous discovery habits and an opportunity solution tree, they reframed the problem in customer…
Lenny Rachitsky argues that launches only get attention when they are genuinely remarkable, something worth talking about. He organizes ten recurring buzz-generating strategies, such as remarkable videos, value…
Part 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 Rachitsky answers a reader's question about taking a marketplace business international, drawing on advice from two former Airbnb leaders who built its European business. The piece argues that expansion…
Melissa Perri and Kevin Broom argue that SaaS companies chasing net retention above 100% through land-and-expand can clash with customers who believe their subscription already covers new features. Using fast food menus…
Guest author Olga Berezovsky explains the difference between correlation and linear regression analysis for product teams. Correlation measures how strongly two variables move together on a scale from -1 to 1, and is a…
Jason Fried reports the results of an experiment where a free event charged a refundable $100 admission, returned at the door to attendees who showed up. Of 55 paid signups, 50 attended, a 90% show rate, compared with…
A community digest from Lenny Rachitsky's paid newsletter covering a range of product and growth questions: SEO keyword prioritization and the debate over domain authority versus content, PM career ladder resources…
Lenny explains when a product should be free and how to choose between freemium and a free trial, based on an analysis of about 50 SaaS pricing models. He frames free as an acquisition strategy, either disrupting a…
Lenny Rachitsky answers a reader question about growth and retention during the 2020 coronavirus downturn by compiling advice from growth operators, investors, and HBR. The core argument is that founders should first…
Lenny Rachitsky lays out the four metrics he considers most important for an early marketplace: fill rate, bookings growth, supply growth, and GMV growth. He explains why each matters, shares practitioner perspectives…
A guest post from GiveDirectly's team, shared alongside a Giving Tuesday fundraising appeal, walks through the experiments that raised roughly $3 million more in donations per year. It covers winning tests like faster…
Lenny Rachitsky marks his newsletter reaching one million subscribers by answering a mailbag of reader questions instead of making big announcements. He describes a small freelance team handling editing, podcast…
This is a short announcement newsletter pointing readers to a guest post Lenny Rachitsky wrote for a16z's Future site on choosing a North Star Metric. The guide draws on a survey of current and former employees at more…
Lenny Rachitsky answers a reader's question about which metrics early-stage bottom-up SaaS founders should track beyond MRR, which tools they use, and how they visualize results. He draws on crowdsourced input and…
Lenny Rachitsky announces Atelier Ventures, the debut $13 million fund of Li Jin, who coined the 'passion economy' term in a 2019 essay. The fund backs platforms that broaden access to new forms of work, lower barriers…
Lenny Rachitsky's guest author, a Google AI product leader, argues that the SaaS freemium playbook breaks down for AI products because each free request carries real compute cost. He proposes a modern AI paywall built…
Lenny Rachitsky polls sixteen growth experts on what counts as a good customer payback period across B2C, SMB and enterprise businesses. The post explains how to calculate payback on a gross-profit basis, why it matters…
The post asks how long marketplace startups take to reach product-market fit and answers by collecting founder accounts from companies like Lyft, DoorDash, Uber, and Airbnb. The core argument is that marketplaces take…
Torres argues that all-time totals, like lifetime registered users, are rarely useful because they only go up and hide whether a product is improving or declining. The right measure depends on choosing a time increment…
Lenny Rachitsky shares near-real-time U.S. job-market data on product and product-adjacent roles, gathered via a third-party data firm. The post argues that growth roles are expanding fastest, PM hiring has plateaued…