Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:04:23 · Lenny Rachitsky, Rob Snyder
[01:04:23] S1: And this is a good thing or not a good thing? [01:04:25] S0: It's a it's a break glass in case of emergency thing Mhmm. Where it's... And I think some founders actually operate like this all the time where it's like, okay. There's actually a conference tomorrow in Europe that has these potential customers there. I can't get them to talk to me, so looks like I'm gonna get on a plane right now and go there. Right? It's just doing kind of somewhat crazy things with the goal of getting in front of customers right now. And, yeah, like, some people can do this all the time. Others like me who are getting old, like, I can I can pull this out once in a while? [01:05:02] S1: Get that goblin mode out sometimes. Yeah. So the idea there's... And you're saying this sometime. This can work. Just like going nuts. Just like going talking to everyone looking for these earned secrets. [01:05:12] S0: Yeah. And one example of this, like, it's kind of a crazy example, but a friend's building a a company called Tiro, which does dental staffing for for dental hygienists. And he... His version of goblin mode was his parents went door to door to different dental offices to just get people to to talk to him about about being customers, and that worked. And so it's just like weird stuff like that can work.
01:05:12 · Rob Snyder, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:05:12] S0: Yeah. And one example of this, like, it's kind of a crazy example, but a friend's building a a company called Tiro, which does dental staffing for for dental hygienists. And he... His version of goblin mode was his parents went door to door to different dental offices to just get people to to talk to him about about being customers, and that worked. And so it's just like weird stuff like that can work. [01:05:36] S1: Amazing. Okay. So you say do a couple sales calls, they do five. Is that is that kind of the idea? Do like five and assess? Is that rough heuristic? Okay. So say, to your point, most times you'll find, okay, this is not... There's no pull here. Sorry. What do you do? Do you go back to the beginning, go hands hands on with some other small business sort of thing, or what do you recommend? [01:05:55] S0: Yeah. So different pathways there. Hopefully, you've asked the Hail Mary question, and you've learned something there that's, like, worth double clicking into. [01:06:03] S1: And the Hail Mary question is just like, what what is there anything that we can do to... With... Yeah. Right now that is a problem on your to do list? [01:06:10] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And it's... And and so you've generated some new information that you can then use to do another set of five. If not, then yeah. You just go back, get some firsthand knowledge, try it again.
01:06:10 · Rob Snyder, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:06:10] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And it's... And and so you've generated some new information that you can then use to do another set of five. If not, then yeah. You just go back, get some firsthand knowledge, try it again. [01:06:24] S1: Awesome. Okay. So this process is very straightforward. Have a pull hypothesis, fill out this template, schedule, basically, cold outbound with a surprising message that'll get people's attention, think you're interesting. Do five calls roughly, get a sense as they're pull or not. If there's not pull, throw out some hail Mary questions, maybe enter goblin mode to look for something, come up with another pull hypothesis, do five more calls, and repeat until you're like, oh, wow. We've got this pull. [01:06:52] S0: Yep. And then you have a business. [01:06:53] S1: There we go. Off to the races. Okay. So say you actually found something, something that is pulling and people are like, I need this now. What comes next? What do you kind of the... There's kind of like the building onboarding process and then just keeping them happy. What's that process like? What advice do you have there?
01:07:12 · Rob Snyder
[01:07:12] S0: Yeah. So I found that I didn't really have a good way to think about what happens after people buy. And so I felt like the dog who got a car, and I just kinda, like, threw the software over the over the over the fence and, like, good luck. What I've learned since then the hard way, obviously, is that, look, retention is super important and it's not obvious. And so the way I think about, like, delivery post sale is that basically everybody who buys is guaranteed to churn until x, in which case they're weird to churn. And all delivery is... Everything is about figuring out what is x and how do you design a bullet train so every customer gets there. And so x is... You might think of it as, oh, they're using the product or they have high NPS or whatever it is. It's almost never those things. Marc Roberge has this kind of leading indicator of retention, which for Slack was like you've sent 10,000 messages or 1,000 messages in your first x amount of time. If you hit that, it's like... It'd be weird if you churned. You're... It's the leading indicator of retention. For my startup, we gave retention software to restaurants. If they got a notification that somebody was going to quit, that they could prevent within the first two weeks after purchase, they would go insane. They would tell all of their friends about it, and it would be weird if they churned. And so we just designed the onboarding process to that. And so what I recommend is once you have a couple people who are saying yes, don't just throw the product over and send them a login and pray. Go deliver firsthand as well, and you're gonna learn a ton from that. And keep asking the question, you gonna churn now? Are you gonna churn now? Like, what? And try to find the moment when when they're like, oh, okay. Cool. I can't live without this.
01:09:06 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:09:06] S1: I love how your mind works, where it's these formulas and these templates and just everything is this. And, obviously, it's not like this clean-cut, but it's really helpful, I think, for people to just think of it in these very structured ways to take these general ideas of what it looks like when things are going well and how to find an idea to just like, here's what you plug in, talk about the specific thing, it's working, adjust. So this is great. On the churn piece, is there... What's like a sign? Okay. Shoot. Everyone's churning. Just like a sign of like, okay. They thought they didn't, but that it's not working. Anything there? Just like, what's a sign at this stage? Okay. Maybe it's not working versus it is.
01:09:42 · Rob Snyder
[01:09:42] S0: Yeah. So if everybody's churning, it is unacceptable for you to not figure out why. And so what I've actually seen is in a lot of cases, like for a lot of horizontal products, you're going to have a lot of user drop off. One one startup I know, they they were a horizontal AI workflows product. Cool. Join the club. Right? But they found through being a horizontal AI workflows product that one or two kinds of customers kept using it while everyone else was churning. And so if a bunch of people are churning, 90% plus of your cost... Your customers are churning. First of all, I'm sorry. It sucks. It really... You know, you wake up at 4AM every morning just sweating. But in that, you often can figure out why. And is it something that you're doing, or is it something about them? And that can tell you, okay. Who actually had pull that we can sell, deliver, retain? And and for, like, that horizontal workflows product, they found that freight forwarders were using it for one specific workflow. So they pivoted the entire company to focus on that. And so they went from being this horizontal product with massive churn, low price, to a very premium product for freight forwarders.