Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:33:17 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:33:17] S1: That's exactly where I wanted to go, which is this other piece of advice you give, which is, "Kill hope before hope kills you." Talk about just what that is because so much of your advice is, "Kill your bad ideas quickly." So just talk about that and then I'm really curious to know what it takes to realize an idea is bad. When do you decide, "Okay, this is B+. Let's move on."
00:33:38 · Mark Pincus
[00:33:38] S0: I don't know if I get credit for making up that quote, but I love it, kill hope before hope kills you. There's a difference between belief and hope. Hope is confidence without basis. Hope is just, it's a prayer, but it's not founded in anything that your lived experience. It's not founded in your experience with your product, your experience with people experiencing your product and the data. And I think that too many founders and teams keep going with the hope that this next release is going to do something magical. And I think that the best product makers, I like to say they're collecting winnings, they're not making bets. They already know. If you talk to Brian Chesky about his launches, he already knows that he has a hit. He's not launching it to find out if people like it. And I talk about the difference between launching an MVP, a minimum viable product, and a maximum launchable product. Because if we're going off hope, we're getting to this MVP, minimum viable, that the viable is the word we got to kill along with hope because viable is where hope comes from. If it's viable, it might make it. And there's a difference between get in the market early, learn. You're putting a product out that you're going to learn from and you're putting a product out that you're going to launch that you think you believe, not hope, is going to be a hit. And it's really important to be crisp and to make that distinction. And AI is a dangerous tool today. It's so powerful that it's dangerous. It's so powerful that it means we can get to a viable product in much less time and money than it took maybe three months instead of three years. And that's a dangerous drug because it means that... What I thought would happen where we'd be today is that people would be using AI to build these incredible testing machines, failure machines that are testing, I like to say more ideas in a week than your industry tests in a year. How are you testing a 100 ideas a day instead of one in three months? I think AI is being used more to build one idea in three months than a hundred ideas in a day. And what would it look like? I like to say we should build it completely wrong before we know it's the right product. So build it wrong before you know it's right. And if you could build it right, great, but don't be slowed down by that.
00:36:35 · Mark Pincus
Because if we start off, if we say, "Okay, what can I believe today? I believe this is the wrong product." What are you going to do differently because you believe it's the wrong product? You are not going to waste three months building the wrong product. "Oh, I'd rather waste a day or a week building the wrong product. But the point of what I'm building is to learn. So is it good enough to get signal and to test my idea?" And I think we can usually pull that apart and test those pieces in the wrong way. It's so often it could be an ad. I cannot believe how many times a team hasn't even tested the ads for their product before they go and put in the markets an afterthought. And it was so often at Zynga, it blew my mind. I mean, I'll give you one story from Zynga. When we were launching our first expansion pack for FarmVille, which these became massive business drivers for us, I think it was FarmVille English Countryside or something. The team came to me and they said, "Okay, we have a $10 million ad budget and we're going to start running ads before the launch." I'm like, "Wait, you have 25, 30 million people a day using your product, but you're going to put ads somewhere else for coming soon. You have these people engaged. What if you just put something on the game board? And what if you don't just start your product marketing, you're still doing product testing to see what gets the most heat? What if you start putting different art forms of your English Countryside locked on the game board and you just see how many clicks you get and you just start testing the look, the feel, the marketing message and at the same time when people click on it says, 'Coming soon, click here to be a pre-user, click here to get access two weeks before anybody else.'" And it turned out everybody clicked on it because it's a change in your game board and it both gave us direction on what was the right marketing and the right variant of the product, but the unintended consequences was we started selling keys to people for you and a friend and we ended up selling $19 million worth of keys to get early access to the new expansion pack. And so we took something that was going to be afterthought advertising, try to drum up interest in this product and turn into something that gave us signal and direction on the product and revenues.
00:39:34 · Mark Pincus, Lenny Rachitsky
And so often you can have, this is an existing product, but you could turn something that was going to be marketing into a kind of scarcity and heat-driving feature, something that could drive revenues or something else that matters. So the way we should be using AI is as a testing machine, a failure machine and a way to vibe code, Claude Code, but build the lowest possible cycled version of your product that you can get signal back on. [00:40:08] S1: Awesome. I want to ask about something that I think might be on people's minds as they hear you talk. For a lot of product builders, when I think Zynga, they're not like, "This is the product I want to build." And there's a spectrum of products you guys have built. There's like FarmVille and CityVille and all these things that I think turn some people off. And then there's like Poker, Words with Friends, Mafia Wars that I think people are like, "Oh, that's amazing. I love that." Can you just speak to that?
00:40:34 · Mark Pincus
[00:40:34] S0: Sure. I think if I'm unpacking that when you say that the products turn people off, it's funny you say that because FarmVille and CityVille were our biggest hits in terms of installs, engagement, retention, revenues. Now, Words with Friends and Poker were more enduring because they made the transition to mobile and the other games didn't. There's a whole other story, but I think the part you're getting to is that Zynga was in a lot of ways a victim of its own success, that our games were so viral and took over the feeds on Facebook so much that your friend who was playing it started to bug you as a person not playing it and that's fair. But what I would say, I think what's misunderstood about Zynga from the beginning and why we succeeded and we created eight massive hits out of 10 mass large game launches. We had a very high hit rate. It wasn't that we were good at virality. It was that we were focused on two things that I think we did better than anybody else and we had lots of competitors, lots and copying and we still managed to keep winning. And so it couldn't be that we were just spammier or better at virality. First, we had this core mission and focus around connecting the world through games and Bing Gordon and I kept coming back to this idea that I love and I want your founders, product makers watching this to join me in thinking about, which is how can we add more dimensionality? I love this idea of, it's why I call it bold beat. It's how do I take this thing that's kind of gotten boring and wrote, poker or whatever, how do I add a whole new dimension to it? And by adding social, by adding real identities, by giving you this, you're doing social networking, you're in this cocktail party and now we're giving you a way to actually meet new people or improve your relationships in a game. Well, the reason why people, so many, especially middle-aged women love FarmVille and these games was because they had this hobby, but they weren't doing it alone and they were doing it with their good friends, making new friends. And in the game, our most successful features were co-op play. There were things that let you do gifting and do things of value for your friends. And so we called the games invest, express and connect. You could do something that was, you were being seen as creative.
00:43:29 · Mark Pincus
I like to say people don't want to be creative, they want to feel creative. So we were letting you feel creative, look creative to people. It's what Midjourney does for me today. And then we were letting you... So you were expressing yourself and then you were connecting with people around it. So that was the first thing. And then if you think at a mechanical metric level, our core metric was retention, not virality. We grew, we outlasted everybody because we had the best retention. I think we were the only consumer company in the world that tracked Day 365 retention. I don't think anyone tracks it today. I talk about in the book, I think it's a gift to your founders. I believe that the most valuable companies in the world, well, statistically this is true, they have the highest Day 365 retention. Can you build against Day 365 retention? Yes. We can't wait till Day 365. We can find early indicators of a positive Day 365 and a negative Day 365 retention. If you have low D1, low D30, you will probably not have high Day 365. So those track, those are correlated, but you can have the opposite. You can have very high Day 30 and a zero Day 365, which is most products. And if you don't think about why someone would use this in a year, if you don't have that mentality, it turns out when someone tries our product, they think that way too. They kind of think, "Is this worth investing in?" Whether it's a game or a camera, it's, "Am I going to use this in a year? Should I tell my friends about this or should I bother investing? Should I bother giving it information about me or whatever?" And I think there's a mentality to that. And I like to say viral-based companies, and there's been many, be real. We've seen these, they're sinking speedboats. They're trying to drive faster than they're sinking. They're trying to get more people in. You can either go faster, bail water out faster, which is trying to get people back or plug the hole in the boat or build a better boat that doesn't have a hole. But we were tracking both in our games, in our network, what was the retention? And we were really constantly thinking about that. And I think the two things to take away from Zynga's success in my opinion that I hold is to have a strong innovation vision that translates to what your teams are doing every week. And we even built a metric that's still not used by anyone.