Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:04:33 · Hector Serrano, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:04:33] S1: Exactly. [00:04:33] S0: Great if there's not real organic product market fit already. Yeah. I imagine this can work for a little bit, and then it just fades away if the product isn't great. So I guess is that just like step lesson one? Needs to be on its own before you start investing in paid? [00:04:49] S1: Yeah, Exactly. I have, like, a lot of founders sometimes reach out or or come by the office or or friends, and they're like, what's the hack? Like, how did Wispr grow so fast? And it's like, no disrespect to other products, but it's like if you're not having that growth early on and you're having to force it a little bit too much, and maybe you have to, like, go back to the drawing board a little bit and, like, rethink how you're actually positioning the product. Is it actually valuable to your users? It... Why isn't it growing by itself organically? And, like, yeah, there's really no hack besides having a good product and then adding more more levers to pull from. [00:05:19] S0: So let me ask, when do you think it makes sense to start investing in these inorganic channels?
00:05:19 · Lenny Rachitsky, Hector Serrano
[00:05:19] S0: So let me ask, when do you think it makes sense to start investing in these inorganic channels? [00:05:24] S1: Well, I think paid is actually one of the best channels to invest on early on. And I learned this from Matt, who's actually our ex head of growth at Wispr. He's now at at Viktor. And a lot of his lessons and lessons that I've learned from him is, like, taking this ecomm approach to SaaS, which a lot of companies, like, scared to turn on the the paid engine. And what happens when you actually turn on the paid engine is you actually learn a lot faster, like, if the messaging actually resonates with your audience, are you actually able to convert this cold traffic into users? And, like, at the end of the day, most companies aren't that skilled in organic content because it is something very, like, new. And unless you have, like, really young people on your team who really understand these organic channels really well and know how to package it, know how to make the content, it's really hard to actually get any clear numbers on does your product actually have legs, do people actually resonate with it, are you actually able to track these conversions, etcetera. So I think paid makes sense from the get go. Obviously, like testing within your your limits and your budgets that you have. But, yeah, if you're able to, like, see, I'm able to turn this cold traffic into paying users, then you kind of have, like, a clear signal there that you... The same messaging or this product will also work on organic if you, like, optimize things a bit more.
00:06:34 · Lenny Rachitsky, Hector Serrano
[00:06:34] S0: I wanna come back to that just like what that early team may look like even maybe pre product market fit. But what's really interesting about what you're sharing here is people, you know, paid has been around for a long time, running ads on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, all these things. Like, there's nothing new as a platform. And what you're saying here is there's still a lot of alpha and opportunity to grow substantially and do something different in paid. [00:06:56] S1: Yeah. A 100%. And, like, a lot of times people also get scared because they'll say, like, oh, I don't wanna turn on the paid engine yet or spend a bunch of money because then we're gonna, like, we're gonna reach a point where we, like, oversaturate this market or this ICP. But at the end this, it's like getting smarter with how you're, again, positioning the product, and there's always new ways or, like, new messaging, new ICPs you can target, and you won't really reach saturation if you're, like, savvy enough with the angles that you're kind of approaching your content with or the paid that you're... Or how you're approaching that paid mechanism, I guess.
00:07:27 · Lenny Rachitsky
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00:08:38 · Hector Serrano, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:08:38] S1: I think it would be kind of good to start maybe from what we learned previously, actually. So where do we go back to? I think this was, like, early twenty twenty five. We had an intern named Tobin. He's a good friend now. I don't know if you've heard of him. He also went pretty viral a while back. He ended up joining Polymarket. But, basically, Tobin came on as an early internal marketing hire. Didn't really have any experience besides some, like, basic UGC. I think he was studying finance and wanted to be a lawyer. And he came in, and Tanay just gave him, like, a budget and was, like, just throw stuff at the wall, see what sticks. Did a few projects, nothing really worked. And then he found really good success with organic UGC. And this was also around, like, the Cluelly era when, like, there wasn't that many people doing it successfully. [00:09:23] S0: Explain organic UGC. What is that exactly?
00:09:26 · Hector Serrano
[00:09:26] S1: Yeah. So organic UGC is you basically get a bunch of creators in a group. These creators will make videos about your product, and then they will post that on their own Instagram pages or own TikTok pages. So imagine you join Wispr's organic UGC group, and you make an account called Lenny Whispr's. And then you just upload your videos into there, and then you get paid based off of a CPM metric. So maybe it's like, I don't know, $2 per thousand views. And then it tapers off, like, as you get higher and higher. And, yeah, Tobin set that up for us. And I think in, like, two and a half months, it was, like, 500,000,000 views, super low CPMs, and it it worked decently well, but I think it was also early on in the organic UGC phase where everyone was really focused on vanity metrics. And it didn't necessarily lead to a lot of conversions because, obviously, the type of product that Wispr Flow is as well, it's a bit harder to get to students... To get students to pay for it. So, ultimately, we ended up killing the program, which I'm not entirely against organic UGC. It's just making sure that you're not, again, chasing the vanity metrics. And then Tobin did this a lot better at Polymarket, he, like, cracked the code with organic UGC and, like, not just doing very top of funnel concepts. But, yeah, organic UGC does work. We just didn't see that much success or the success we wanted at Wispr, and it was also gonna be really hard to find someone to take Tobin's role after he left. So we're like, let's just kill this. And then, again, paid was working relatively well for us. So that kinda brings us to where we're at now where... I mean, not now, but, like, seven months ago, I realized that paid was working really well, and I was the one making all the paid assets. So I was like, what if we apply Tobin's playbook from organic UGC of, like, building this community, building this roster, and paying off performance, and we just apply it to paid, and we maybe make the ads a bit more middle of funnel, maybe a bit more pitching the product. I mean, not even just middle of funnel because you need everything in paid ads, but more just like pitching the product straight on instead of just like screen on text ads. And then I stumbled upon Trybe, which I don't know if you want me... Do you me to get into that now?