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 Podcast74 min
Yuriy Timen · Sep 1, 2022
Key learnings- Give every channel a real test before judging it; many teams wrongly conclude YouTube or other tactics don't work because they…
- Virality works best when the product has inherent network effects, where utility grows with more users, rather than trying to…
- Treat SEO as a 3-month time-boxed experiment, favoring angles with a unique editorial, programmatic, or data advantage, and buy a…
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 Newsletter♥ 98
Aug 9, 2022 · 43 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyPart five of a six-part series on building a consumer business, focused on retention and finding product-market fit. The post argues PMF is a spectrum of confidence, signaled by flattening retention curves, organic…
Lenny’s Podcast111 min
Ben Williams · Nov 6, 2022
Key learnings- Start with a narrow, deep use case for one developer community (Snyk began with Node.js developers) to validate product-market…
- Design acquisition loops into the product itself, such as Snyk-branded pull requests that educate other developers and drive them…
- Build programmatic SEO assets, like Snyk Advisor's package health pages, that generate and index large volumes of pages…
Lenny’s Newsletter · Free post♥ 48
Jul 13, 2021 · 12 min
Lenny Rachitsky examines how labor marketplaces find and grow their supply side, drawing on interviews with founders and early team members of roughly a dozen fast-growing companies. Because these platforms connect…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresJan 30, 2014
Jan 30, 2014 · 4 min
“In Monday’s post, we outlined our success funnel, identified our points of leverage, and explored a few ways you can set and hit aggressive goals. Some of you, the lucky ones, might be asking yourself, what do you do when your success funnel is converting well? What types of”
Lenny’s Newsletter · Free post♥ 512
Jan 16, 2024 · 13 min
Lenny Rachitsky and Dan Hockenmaier argue that every business can be reduced to a simple equation, and that you don't fully understand your business until you can write one. Building the equation forces teams to name…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 185
Feb 14, 2023 · 21 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyLenny Rachitsky surveys growth inflection stories from roughly two dozen well-known products to find what tends to precede sudden growth jumps. He sorts them into three groups: product improvements, external events that…
Lenny’s Newsletter · Free post♥ 100
Dec 19, 2019 · 12 min
Lenny Rachitsky closes his eight-part marketplace growth series by asking founders and operators what they would do differently. The answers cluster around a few recurring regrets: spreading effort too thin instead of…
Lenny’s Podcast115 min
Elena Verna 3.0 · Jun 23, 2022
Key learnings- Founders should drive the first stage of growth themselves; hire a growth leader only after product-market fit, strong retention…
- A growth team cannot fix a declining core product or go-to-market; stabilize the core issues first before adding growth resources.
- Homepage and brand redesigns rarely lift acquisition immediately; plan for three to six months of post-launch optimization or…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 214
Apr 2, 2024 · 23 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyDuolingo's VP of Engineering Sean Colombo shares five growth lessons from scaling daily active users from 5 million to nearly 30 million. The core argument is that urgency and fast experiment rollout compound growth…
Lenny’s Podcast118 min
Jackson Shuttleworth · Dec 15, 2024
Key learnings- Streaks are an engagement amplifier, not a substitute: first make sure the core product is something users want to return to…
- Choose a unit of use that matches real engagement; simplifying the streak to one lesson kept users, but dumbing it down to one…
- Focus effort on the first seven days, since loss aversion appears to kick in once a streak reaches about seven days and retention…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 262
Apr 23, 2024 · 18 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyA guest post by Kyle Poyar compiling 25 low-effort, high-impact quick wins that operators at well-known tech companies used in their first months in a role. The ideas span funnel friction, pricing tweaks, workflow…
Lenny’s Podcast115 min
Albert Cheng · Oct 5, 2025
Key learnings- Alternate between exploring for new insights and exploiting proven wins; when experiments stop reaching significance, return to…
- Share experiment learnings across the company so adjacent teams can apply the same human-psychology insight to their own parts of…
- Make a free tier a taste of the full product's value rather than a stripped-down version; sampling paid suggestions to free users…
Lenny’s Podcast159 min
Eli Schwartz · Sep 19, 2024
Key learnings- Treat SEO as a product: start by understanding the user's search journey and what they would actually type before investing…
- Skip SEO if you can't name the specific searches your target user would make; many SaaS products lack a real search journey and…
- Expect AI answers to absorb top-of-funnel discovery queries, and focus SEO effort on mid-funnel, intent-rich queries where users…
Lenny’s Podcast107 min
Jonathan Becker · May 7, 2023
Key learnings- Don't put all your marketing budget into one paid channel; treat spend like a portfolio and diversify across channels to avoid…
- Judge paid lead-gen by downstream revenue, not cost per lead; a higher-cost lead that converts to valuable customers can…
- Use a lead scoring model fed by CRM revenue data to bid more on audiences likely to become high-value customers, especially when…
Lenny’s Podcast80 min
Carilu Dietrich · Apr 30, 2023
Key learnings- Hypergrowth depends on an amazing product that people love, which spreads organically through inbound and viral word of mouth…
- To reach the C-suite, tie your work to revenue, learn how finances work, and think in terms of what the CEO and board care about.
- Take on tours of duty in other departments and volunteer for interim roles, which builds the cross-functional insight and visible…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 128
Jul 12, 2022 · 16 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyThis post, step two of a six-part series on launching consumer businesses, argues that early growth depends on picking an almost comically narrow 'super-specific who' as the first target audience. It draws on examples…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 135
Nov 8, 2022 · 17 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyA follow-up on activation metrics explaining a three-step method: brainstorm candidate moments from usage data, test them with regression against retention, then run experiments to confirm causality. It adds real reader…
Lenny’s Podcast135 min
Bangaly Kaba · May 26, 2024
Key learnings- Optimize for impact rather than compensation, since pay and scope follow from the impact you deliver.
- Score your environment (manager, resources, scope, team, compensation, culture) quarterly to see which factor is limiting your…
- Your manager is the most powerful environment variable; if it's a bad fit, first try to understand what they optimize for before…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 45
Oct 5, 2021 · 16 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyLenny Rachitsky shares a curated directory of roughly 200 favorite reads, listens, and watches on growth, startups, writing, angel investing, product management, leadership, and frameworks, cleaned up and expanded for…
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 NewsletterAug 12, 2024
Aug 12, 2024 · 18 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyHila Qu, a growth advisor and former GitLab and Acorns growth leader, walks through how B2B companies can add a product-led growth (PLG) motion alongside sales. Her core argument is that PLG and sales are complementary…