Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:07:12 · Mark Pincus
Look for where that's the best of breed proven, whether it's Apple or Snapchat or Instagram, and copy those legally. And with hopefully some taste we can get into great copies and bad copies, but be a master of the proven first. Get your PhD in proven first. And I like to say we haven't earned the right to innovate on the camera until we are the world's leading PhD on the best mobile cameras that already exist. And then better is usually we can't find better. Better is usually very small increments and innovations and better is something that 10 out of 10 of the existing users of that product would say, "Fuck yeah." 10 out of 10, not you. What you think is better is called new. What we think is better is new. We usually are too ambitious on the new and so better could be it's now free, there's no download. There's something that you can both statistically show works, is better and every user would say yes to. And usually it's very small and it's polished and it's things that intense users, power users will notice the most. And in our game, Words With Friends, it was Scrabble, but if it was just Scrabble, why was it a massive hit with 14 million DAUs and Scrabble itself wasn't, right? There must have been something better and novel about it, but it had such a polish for mobile was the better. And the new, what's the novel new idea, the back of the box idea that's going to get people to download and try it? In the case of Words with Friends, it was social. It was your friends are just ... It was attached to the Facebook graph and your friends are just already there to play with you, which was a new idea. Even that which you'd think, "Of course I want ..." You might not get 10 out of 10 people saying yes, and we have to accept that that new idea is probably going to fail. It's a reason to try it for people, but it's probably going to fail. And if we do Proven, Better, New right, the product has much better odds of succeeding in the market, not failing for the wrong reasons. And if we start with the premise that the new is probably not right and we've got four other new ideas ready to test, then we just prosecute it in a different way. I like to think if you do Proven, Better, New right, it's like a time machine because what if I could go back to Mark 2003 and '4 and say, "Dude, you don't even realize how right you are.
00:10:43 · Mark Pincus
One of your instincts is going to be a $1.6 trillion company once," and you are a year ahead of them, right? You're a year ahead of a $1.6 trillion company. I'm not going to tell you which, I'm not going to totally cheat, but I'm just going to tell you, "There's something, there's another answer in this that you could pursue that'd be worth 1.6 trillion. Oh, and by the way, your Tribe idea, that's Reddit, that becomes a whole company industry listings." So there was a point in Tribe where I knew my metrics weren't working, our D30 retention was terrible. We were a sinking speedboat. And if I had had this attitude of I'm going to try a lot more ideas, I'm going to look around me. If you're doing Proven, Better New, you're also looking around you for what are you finding heat that's proven in the market that you can also go test? And I would have massively changed my odds of success.
00:12:04 · Lenny Rachitsky, Mark Pincus
[00:12:04] S1: Okay. There's so much here. So just to summarize how I think about this framework, which is so good, if you start to really think through all the products that have succeeded and how many of them actually follow this, whether they were conscious or not, it's wild. So kind of the steps that I hear is, so Proven, Better, New. Proven is make a list of the things that are proven to be working already in the market, things people love about this sort of space. Better is make something that is not just better, but that 10 out of 10 people will say, "Eff yeah, I would switch. This is better." And then add something new that nobody's tried before, that adds a little wrinkle. And I think a little bit like you have a bunch of examples in the book, Slack and Threads. There's also like, if you think about the iPhone and the iPod, you don't think about them that way, but basically the iPod, there was a music player, they made it better and they added some new stuff and it- [00:12:54] S0: Yeah. [00:12:54] S1: ... was one of the best products in the world.
00:12:55 · Mark Pincus
[00:12:55] S0: And I was there at the TED conference when this team from MIT was demoing their touchscreen. And they did it on a gigantic whiteboard and Steve Jobs was obsessed with it. They had a whiteboard and they had a table with it and I watched him and he spent the whole time there with this team obsessing over their touch. I don't know if that's the first time he saw it, but I know he was obsessed with it like, okay, there's his new idea is a touchscreen. It's only new idea. And I want to say proven gets so misused. And that what I've found over the years with founders is that they start to use Proven, Better, New to justify a wrong idea. And they're like, "Look, Mark, I'm doing proven. Proven is this game that was popular in the '90s. Proven is," and they pick something and it's to their own detriment, they're not using proven ... We have to be precise. We have to think at the pixel level of this experience. Proven is on this platform for this audience, for this experience. And you can look to what's been proven before as great sources of new ideas, but if it's not on this platform, it doesn't count as proven. And yet the masters at this product craft do Proven, Better, New, whether they call it that or not, and they do it at such a beautiful level that nobody even thinks ... No one realizes what it's derivative of. And Slack was a great example because I think Slack might've just been proven and better and no new and that's even better. If you can have a successful product, and I don't want to sound anti-innovation, but people don't like change. So if you take a behavior they like, but you make it much more accessible or something much more fun about it, like in the case of Slack, people love that even more.
00:15:13 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:15:13] S1: There's this thread of copying that comes through this framework that will turn a lot of people off. Talk about what you think people are missing and how you get over that hump of like this is actually the right approach in most cases.
00:15:27 · Mark Pincus
[00:15:27] S0: In the Peter Thiel sense, it's almost a moral arbitrage because there's something in our gut as a product maker. You became a founder, an entrepreneur because you wanted to go be an innovator. So it can feel like a beat down that your path to innovation starts with copying other people's work. And we are taught in school, copying is cheating. So there's a lot of good reasons why we've built this kind of moral resistance to copying. But that also makes that opportunity in some ways more available for people who have less ego involved. And I like to say, and I said this to my product makers at Zynga, if you're truly ambitious, burn your resume. And if you define your ambition in the eyes of your consumer, not your peers, you're not trying to win awards and respect from your peers, you're trying to win the hearts and minds of nurses in Indiana, like for Farmville, you're going to define innovation differently and you're not going to worry about whether ... You're going to take the best ideas wherever you can find them if they are in service of giving her an experience that she loves more. So if all you did was copy, there's no reason for her to choose your product, right? But if you took something that she loves and you make it one inch better, she might love that more than if you showed her something she's never seen before and didn't wake up knowing that she wanted. And I think that the art of this is you do it in a way that she doesn't even realize it. Because I think consumer taste also resists just a copy. I think that if movies, TV shows, books, if they feel too derivative and they're not adding something important and new, then it could go against our consumer taste. But the best product makers, and I love referencing someone like Craig Newmark and Craigslist, who took two years to add photos to Craigslist listings. And he lived in my neighborhood and he was friends with my dog, Zynga, more than he was friends with me. He was a little awkward socially and he connected more with the dog and I tried to be friends with him through the dog. So he would sit and talk to me and he was working on ...