Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:36:42 · Lenny Rachitsky, Sean Ellis
[01:36:42] S0: Oh, story of the BlackBerry. [01:36:44] S1: Yeah. I mean, obviously, we all kind of know the story, but it was... So really, it's a classic example of product market fit and then not. It's probably even a counterexample to the dangers of how would you feel if you could no longer use this product? Pretty sure most people would have said on BlackBerry, it's the keyboard. And until iPhone came along, you know, the keyboard was super important, then suddenly it wasn't. But, yeah, it's also also interesting on, like, egos and and other things that, like, every... Everybody's getting friendly in the beginning, and then and then egos take over, and things get a lot harder later on. [01:37:23] S0: That was actually a really good movie. There's also an amazing movie called Tetris for some reason, I think of these two together about the story of Tetris. There's like some... It's like a similar parallels to those two movies. [01:37:32] S1: Awesome. I'll have to see that one. [01:37:34] S0: Next question. Do you have a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love? [01:37:39] S1: I forget the name of it, but it's called Pack Gear Hanging Suitcase. And basically, I've done almost 100,000 miles in travel this year, and I have another trip scheduled for next week. And I love it because it basically has all my clothes folded in this little insert that goes into my suitcase and then I just pull it out and hang it up and just makes makes travel way easier. [01:38:06] S0: It's called the pack gear suitcase? [01:38:08] S1: Pack gear hanging suitcase organizer.
01:38:08 · Sean Ellis, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:38:08] S1: Pack gear hanging suitcase organizer. [01:38:12] S0: So cool. Gonna check that out. Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to that you find useful in work or in life, maybe share with friends and family sometimes?
01:38:22 · Sean Ellis
[01:38:22] S1: Focus on on reputation and learning over earnings, has served me super well that, and I'll give you an example. I had I had two companies when I was doing a lot of this early interim stuff, yeah, ten plus years ago. And I had two of them where I talked to the founders afterwards, and I could tell they weren't like that stoked on my contributions. And I offered a full refund to both of them with the thought that I have this reputation that's I randomly pulled the numbers. My reputation is worth $5,000,000 Why would I possibly mortgage that reputation for $20,000 And so one of them, I gave the check back to them and he was happy to take it. But he had said, Oh, you can make it up to me. I don't you don't have give me the check, just make it up to me by continuing to help me for an unlimited amount of time going forward. Was like, Oh, take the check. And then the other one said, No, no, I'm actually really happy with what you did. We're fine. But the two VCs who had made those introductions were the first two to give me term sheets when I went out to raise money for my company and the pre money ultimately ended up being valued at more than double what I had put my personal reputation at. Unfortunately, the company didn't do that well itself because of the elusive product market fit challenges. But the learning there of just focus on learning and reputation. Reputation opened the door to more and more learning. And as I got more learning, the reputation grew. And so, yeah.
01:40:03 · Lenny Rachitsky, Sean Ellis
[01:40:03] S0: There's a really good corollary there with customer support. Like, if someone just hates your product and wants a refund, just give them give them a refund and let them move on versus being upset. [01:40:12] S1: Yeah. Absolutely. [01:40:13] S0: I love that. Final question. You mentioned to me when we... Before we started recording that you were maybe indirectly responsible for TikTok's success. Maybe share that story. [01:40:24] S1: Yeah. I mean, I I don't wanna overstate it, but I... Yeah. My trip around the world that I did three months ago, think I wrapped it up. I met with the original Founding Growth team at TikTok. They're based in Singapore and they had I can't remember what the previous product was called, but they started with the previous product. And then when TikTok came, they were in place to be the initial growth team for TikTok. They basically said, All the early stuff we did to grow TikTok was based on your writing. So that was before the book came out, it's a lot of just blogging that I had done, it was really cool to get that feedback that, yeah, I've always said I have some really good wins. Have a lot of unicorns that I helped, but none of the really, really big guys. Then to hear that, it felt really good to know that I played some kind of role in TikTok. Of course, almost the same week they told me that that was Congress having TikTok banned conversations. So it it was it was good. At the same time, knowing that maybe if they hadn't read my stuff, Congress wouldn't be wasting their time on TikTok bans.
01:41:36 · Lenny Rachitsky, Sean Ellis
[01:41:36] S0: Oh, man. Bittersweet. I hope they don't pull you into some hearings. Sean, this was incredible. This was everything I was hoping it'd be. I feel like we collected so much wisdom here for folks to help them figure out product market fit, find product market fit, iterate, grow their products. So happy we did this. Two final questions. Where can folks find stuff that you're up to if they wanna learn more and maybe work with you in various ways? And how can listeners be useful to you? [01:42:00] S1: Awesome. Yeah. So seanellis.me is the website where I kind of link to all the things that I'm doing. And so that would be one place where, you know, and there's contact forms on there if anyone wants to reach out. Obviously LinkedIn, people can contact me there. And then I did mention GoPractice, so gopractice.io. Really cool way to learn growth through a simulated environment of being able to try to grow products. So check out check out Go Practice and maybe go to seanellis.me when this comes out. I'll I'll put a special offer on there for Lenny's listeners so you can save some money. [01:42:36] S0: And there's also a LLM AI kind of [01:42:40] S1: I wasn't directly involved on that one, but there's... Yeah. There's there's some other really cool stuff that Oleg and the team are doing. I've I've been... Data driven product management and and the user growth programs are the ones that I helped with.
01:42:40 · Sean Ellis, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:42:40] S1: I wasn't directly involved on that one, but there's... Yeah. There's there's some other really cool stuff that Oleg and the team are doing. I've I've been... Data driven product management and and the user growth programs are the ones that I helped with. [01:42:53] S0: Awesome. And then for folks, if they're wondering, do you do advising? How do you help with company? How do you work with companies in case they're like, Hey, I need Sean? [01:43:00] S1: Yeah. I mean, so the sweet spot for me on companies that I go hands on with are ideally pretty early just after they get to product market fit and now you know how to measure it. So if you're kind of prescale but you're seeing that 40% or even if you're a bit earlier than that, we can start talking earlier. But to me, that's my favorite time to get in there, build it right from the beginning. It's so hard to retroactively do these things. And I'll go in for three to six months and I'm all in full time, one of the team trying really help build traction in the business. Do one of those every maybe year or maybe every year or two because I purposely burn myself out and then have fun doing more lecturing and workshops and stuff. [01:43:50] S0: Awesome. Well, you might get a flood of requests, after this comes out. Hope you're ready. Sean, thank you so much for being here. [01:43:57] S1: Awesome. Thank you, Lenny. I really appreciate you having me on.