Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:09:00 · Becky Kennedy, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:09:00] S1: You're like this too. It's helpful to have a framework to come back to. [01:09:02] S0: Just these words are so... And you don't have to say them exactly, but these specific ways of phrasing is actually really great. Okay. Let's come back to how people can get your advice constantly. So a lot of people see your advice on TikTok and Instagram, just kind of on Twitter and all these places, just like, "Oh, there's Dr. Becky giving me some awesome advice." Not a lot of people know you have an epic business and product and community. Talk about that, just what you've built there, what it is, what people should know.
01:09:28 · Becky Kennedy
[01:09:28] S1: So what started as an... I put up my first Instagram post on, I think it was February 28th, 2020. So it was two weeks before New York City at least shut down, probably a lot of places in the US. And I didn't have some premonition about COVID. The timing was just kind of nutty. And I even put up that post without any business in mind. I felt so compelled by these ideas around what we've been talking about and how different they are from what we've been handed down to us as truth that the only way I can describe it is, this sounds like awful and visceral, but it felt like I was vomiting them out and I just needed somewhere to put them. And so when I look back, I was like, "Why did I do that?" I don't know. It was more like relief than intentional goal setting. And then New York City shut down. And then what happened was things just took fire. And what was really powerful and I just kind of watched happen and tried to respond to was the community that formed around it, what people wanted. I started doing these live workshops just because I had so much more to say than I could put into a carousel post. And the way people were connecting live, it still happens now in the live events. I think certain ideas I have or stories I tell can be really impactful to people, but if I had to choose between that versus what happens in our community, I would bet on the community every time. It's just amazing because I think these ideas tap into some value system or healing inside of ourselves and safe communities form around value systems. And so what ended up happening from there is people were just telling us. They actually kind of incepted this idea like, "Dr. Becky, I feel like you're doing parent school." And I was like, "What?" And they're like, "I go to school for everything that I've ever cared about." And I always joke that a friend said, "Do you know how much money I spent on gardening school? I like my flowers, but I care about my children more, but I've spent more time and I've invested more in my tiny little garden or my cooking or my hobby." Certainly I've spent more learning about Greek history, which for most of us, no shade to Greece, doesn't actually impact our life that much anymore than I have in parenting.
01:11:34 · Becky Kennedy, Lenny Rachitsky
And I realized, and this is what this whole, our business is around, is I really feel like parenting is the last area in life that we glorify instinct alone, where we say, especially to women, this whole idea of maternal instinct, I don't know, this is probably a little controversial, I was like, "Wow, what a way to gaslight parents." Not to say there aren't some moments that are instinctual, but if I'm parenting by instinct, do you want to know what I'm going to do when my kid has a tantrum or when my kids lies in my face? It's not going to be pretty. I don't know if any of us feel like that's a good option. [01:12:09] S0: I believe you. No, you would not do that.
01:12:09 · Becky Kennedy
[01:12:09] S1: Yeah. Right. And instinct, by the way, what's instinct? It's everything we've learned until that point. And what feels naturally in parenting is simply how we were parented. That's all that's going to be natural. And so I really, like I started to get very angry with my community where like, why isn't there a better way? And by the way, with modern technology, shouldn't this be easy on your phone? Shouldn't you get access, not to make a moment perfect, but we all spiral after a hard moment. It's not the spiral that makes us have a bad week. It's the way we extend the spiral from how we talk about ourselves and the bad patterns. That last weeks. These are the things that add up to our and our kids' mental health. And I did, I started to get angry thinking there should just be a better option for parents to learn without shame, without the expectation of perfection, to have something in their pocket, to combine it with modern technology, now AI, so many different things, and to preserve the human interactive element. So yeah, so that's what Good Inside is. My co-founder and I are both psychologists. We've known each other forever, and we have a whole team where, yes, there's the podcast and Instagram. And I always consider those flags, like a strategy and a tip we hear, they're like flags. They're like things we try, but most of our struggle in parenting is we don't have a framework and an actual approach, which is the ground we would plant a flag into, which is why parenting feels like whack-a-mole where we're just trying things, right? Even though we would never do that at work. We don't even do that with gardening or tennis. And so Good Inside and our app to me is the most modern, alive, personalized, technologically informed way of feeling like I have something in my pocket and someone and a community too in my pocket that can just close the gap between how I kind of want to show up and how I do show up. None of us close the gap completely, but I do believe we deserve access to tools that can help us do that. And that's what Good Inside as a business is built around.
01:14:07 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:14:07] S0: Just to give you a more chance to plug what this is, exactly, what do people get when they say download the app, sign up for the community?
01:14:13 · Becky Kennedy
[01:14:13] S1: What you get is, first of all, you get to just tell us what's going on with you, and we get to be the holder of that story and make sure we hit on the important themes. I really do believe, I know kind of, not formula that makes it too specific and perfect, but we need to learn how to set boundaries. We need to learn how to stay connected to our kid without martyring ourselves. By the way, I also think the thing that you get in the app, which we have to learn better communication if we're in a partnership because that gets tricky. We have to learn how to repair. We have to understand why we get so activated in our nervous system, and we have to do it in a way that we could do, I don't know, five minutes here or there in the go. So that's exactly what we're set up to do. If you can give us five minutes, we will give you something that's not just a tip, that is something... I always combine two things, understanding and action, right? Insight and something that you can actually do today, because I think that's how we can take a deep breath, understanding gives us clarity, and action gives us capability, and that's what we give parents. So you get that, we'll drip it to you, you tell us what's going on. We also have an incredible AI chatbot experience that also beyond helping you in the moment can help you say like, "Hey, this kind of thing that seems different, they're all kind of the same. Here's the common theme. Here's what we suggest for you to kind of get ahead of things." And then there are so many live events. I believe deeply that parenting is something where we have to connect to people. So I do, I don't know, usually two or three live events in a month. We have coaches we've trained, so we've manualized the Good Inside approach. We have coaches who do support sessions. If you have a deeply feeling kid, you can come to as many of those in a month as you want. And there's always a parent to kind of connect. And so I would say you get answers to your questions, you get deeper dives if that's for you and you have the time and you love to learn. And then you also have a very, very active, expert driven, but also just parent community for the live connected help that I think we all need.