Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:00:00 · Lenny Rachitsky, Hector Serrano
[00:00:00] S0: You have been doing this insanely incredible job growing Wispr Flow over the past couple years. You joined Wispr Flow at 19. [00:00:06] S1: I looked up creator jobs on LinkedIn. Applied to, like, 200 positions. I found some company called Wispr Flow. I applied, had a call with Tanay, and then I joined. I've never worked in a startup. And I told Tanay, like, was like, I want equity in Wispr. And Tanay laughed and was like, I like you, man. [00:00:21] S0: There's all this talk about no jobs left for young folks. AI is taking everyone's jobs. Young people are actually much better at this work. [00:00:27] S1: A 30, 40 year old founder doesn't understand what an 18 year old kid who's in these Discord chats scrolling every day on Instagram and TikTok. They don't understand what's actually working and the best ways to approach these new channels. I think it's a no brainer to have someone like that on your team. [00:00:41] S0: I actually had this tweet the other day. The best marketers are allergic to AI. [00:00:44] S1: If we go out and start making AI slop ads, it's probably not gonna be received really well. There's so much noise. If you actually focus more on the quality and less on the quantity, it gets so easy to cut through the noise. [00:00:55] S0: Let's talk about paid UGC. You're getting influencers, creators to create a pitch basically for Wispr [00:01:00] S1: and keep it really open for them to experiment, do whatever they see fit. They're not capped at their earnings. We have creators now that are making, like, dollars $13 a month.
00:01:00 · Hector Serrano, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:01:00] S1: and keep it really open for them to experiment, do whatever they see fit. They're not capped at their earnings. We have creators now that are making, like, dollars $13 a month. [00:01:08] S0: The hardest role to hire for right now is someone like you. [00:01:11] S1: I think if you just think that looking for someone with the best grades or the best score isn't gonna get you the best hire, you're in for a rude awakening. [00:01:21] S0: Hector, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast. [00:01:25] S1: Thank you, thank you. I'm excited to be on. [00:01:27] S0: I'm even more excited to have you here. What I'm going to try to do with this conversation is create a very tactical guide to what is working in growing a B2B SaaS product right now. You have been doing this insanely incredible job growing Wispr Flow over the past couple years. I saw the stats that revenue at Wispr Flow grew 30X in the past year, which is absurd. You guys recently raised at something like $2,000,000,000 in a very competitive market. Clearly, you have figured something out. You've started to share some of the strategies that you've been deploying on x, and so we're gonna be going deeper into the stuff that you've seen work. First of all, give us kind of a sense of what it is you... You're responsible for at Wispr Flow. What's kind of your your job there, and what do you work on?
00:01:27 · Lenny Rachitsky, Hector Serrano
[00:01:27] S0: I'm even more excited to have you here. What I'm going to try to do with this conversation is create a very tactical guide to what is working in growing a B2B SaaS product right now. You have been doing this insanely incredible job growing Wispr Flow over the past couple years. I saw the stats that revenue at Wispr Flow grew 30X in the past year, which is absurd. You guys recently raised at something like $2,000,000,000 in a very competitive market. Clearly, you have figured something out. You've started to share some of the strategies that you've been deploying on x, and so we're gonna be going deeper into the stuff that you've seen work. First of all, give us kind of a sense of what it is you... You're responsible for at Wispr Flow. What's kind of your your job there, and what do you work on? [00:02:16] S1: First of all, I just wanna give a lot of credit to the other members of the team. Like, what I touch up on the days, a very small part of the business, and that's mainly content as a whole. I'm a content creator myself, and that's how I originally came into Wispr, and that role obviously evolved a lot, and now I'm kind of in charge of our paid UGC program on the actual content side. I'm not on the media buying side of things. And then on top of that, also managing our organic channels for our founder, like YouTube and Instagram.
00:02:16 · Hector Serrano, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:02:16] S1: First of all, I just wanna give a lot of credit to the other members of the team. Like, what I touch up on the days, a very small part of the business, and that's mainly content as a whole. I'm a content creator myself, and that's how I originally came into Wispr, and that role obviously evolved a lot, and now I'm kind of in charge of our paid UGC program on the actual content side. I'm not on the media buying side of things. And then on top of that, also managing our organic channels for our founder, like YouTube and Instagram. [00:02:43] S0: Okay. Awesome. Something that I've noticed about you and something that I think is really rare these days is you're you're very good at breaking through the noise, both in the content you create, like your tweets recently have just gone crazy viral on Twitter. Everyone's sharing it all over my feeds. So clearly you figured out how to do that yourself, also with the ad work that you do, the UGC work that you do, also very effective, so there's a lot that we can all learn from you and what you [00:03:09] S1: figured Thank you. [00:03:10] S0: So just kind of zooming out first, talk about the the growth levers that you have been spending time on. What has been working recently in growing Wispr Flow slash can work for other b to b SaaS products?
00:03:10 · Lenny Rachitsky, Hector Serrano
[00:03:10] S0: So just kind of zooming out first, talk about the the growth levers that you have been spending time on. What has been working recently in growing Wispr Flow slash can work for other b to b SaaS products? [00:03:23] S1: I think the first one, and it's maybe a bit corny to say, but I think most importantly, Wispr has grown at the rate it has because of the product. It's... Everything has been product led growth since the beginning. I joined at the preproduct stage, and I remember we had a few thousand users early on and just... I don't know where it just started catching steam in, like, six months in. I remember Tanay said, hey. He was like, wow. We really found PMS. Like, it found, like, we struck gold. And then from there, just adding on all these other channels, whether it be organic, paid, everything is just adding more fuel to the fire. And what we found a lot of success with through trial and error, doing a bunch of different things, me testing a bunch of channels, other people testing a bunch of channels. It's like one of the main ones we've landed on now is paid, and we're funneling that with a lot of UGC content. And we have a lot of pillars inside of paid, whether that be UGC video, statics, influencers, in house videos, founder storytelling. But, yeah, paid ads as a whole, it be to Meta, LinkedIn, YouTube, etcetera, has definitely become one of our main pillars at Wispr, and it's one of the things I'm leading on the content side of things.
00:03:23 · Hector Serrano, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:03:23] S1: I think the first one, and it's maybe a bit corny to say, but I think most importantly, Wispr has grown at the rate it has because of the product. It's... Everything has been product led growth since the beginning. I joined at the preproduct stage, and I remember we had a few thousand users early on and just... I don't know where it just started catching steam in, like, six months in. I remember Tanay said, hey. He was like, wow. We really found PMS. Like, it found, like, we struck gold. And then from there, just adding on all these other channels, whether it be organic, paid, everything is just adding more fuel to the fire. And what we found a lot of success with through trial and error, doing a bunch of different things, me testing a bunch of channels, other people testing a bunch of channels. It's like one of the main ones we've landed on now is paid, and we're funneling that with a lot of UGC content. And we have a lot of pillars inside of paid, whether that be UGC video, statics, influencers, in house videos, founder storytelling. But, yeah, paid ads as a whole, it be to Meta, LinkedIn, YouTube, etcetera, has definitely become one of our main pillars at Wispr, and it's one of the things I'm leading on the content side of things. [00:04:25] S0: Awesome. Okay. So let's let's dive in there, but first, I think to your point, it's really important to say, none of this will really work if your product isn't [00:04:33] S1: Exactly.