Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:10:54 · Lenny Rachitsky, Rob Snyder
[01:10:54] S1: There's no point at which like, okay, we figured it out. We're gonna be a massive success. Like every moment of the startup journey is an uncertain moment. But what's great about this process so far is every step you get, it's more and more certain. There's something here at least. And then there's like the in forever doubt of like how big can this get. I remember talking to the founder of Databricks, is now like a bazillion trillion dollar company. And he said something like, even at a 100,000,000 ARR, they were still very unclear if this was a thing that will last. And I think it's very common. So that's it's like its own topic of just like That's [01:11:26] S0: nice to know. That's nice to know. Because everyone... Yeah. Ever... Everyone's like, how will this become a big thing? It's like, I don't know. We'll figure it out. [01:11:34] S1: Yeah. It's just kind of one step at a time. And and so so in this conversation, the final step in my mind is this idea you have of this use user case study factory, which kind of takes you from things are starting to work to okay, now we can create a repeatable system that helps us grow. So talk about that, what that looks like, what that's about.
01:11:53 · Rob Snyder
[01:11:53] S0: Yeah. So this is the thing that whenever I talk about, everyone just, like... Everyone's eyes glaze over, and so I haven't found found a useful way to talk about this yet. So just free warning. I think it's the most important thing in in all of this, which is how do you think about your startup? What's your conceptual model for your startup? And, like, you need to have a way to think about your startup to know how to grow it as fast as humanly possible. So what winds up happening is you find somebody who has pull. You give them a product or service or whatever that they pull out of your hands. So it turns out they were trying to do x, their existing options weren't good enough for y, and you offer z that helps unblock them. That sounds a lot like a case study that you would feature on your website. And it's a helpful thing because, okay, my job as a founder is not to produce a 100 different case studies, totally different case studies, because that's not scalable. That's not repeatable. I'm looking to build one case study where a customer says hell yes before they buy and after they buy and just repeat that a million times. And so that model helped me go from thinking that startups were a bunch of different things. I need to know all these different things to like, No, a startup is just a thing that repeats one case study infinite times. And all the stuff that I do is to build a factory for repeating that case study. And if I do this right, there's a case study where customers say hell yes, and they pull themselves through each step of the factory. The steps are the pipeline step, how do we get people to talk to us? Sales step, how do we turn potential customers into actual customers? And the delivery step of the case study factory, which is how do we get people who are customers to be weird not to churn? And so everything we do kind of fits into this case study factoring. If you see this in your mind, it radically simplifies a startup, how it works. And then you can use the theory of constraints, we're gonna get really nerdy for a second, from manufacturing to look at your case study factoring and say, okay, where the bottleneck to our growth? Is it that we don't have enough pipeline? Okay, cool. If that's the bottleneck, then that's the only thing that matters right now. Let's solve that bottleneck and then we'll move to the next one.
01:14:06 · Rob Snyder, Lenny Rachitsky
The next one is our close rate is lower than it should be. Okay, cool. That's our bottleneck. Now we're going go all in on that. And so it lets you go... The case study factory model gives you a way of thinking about your startup and knowing exactly where to focus at any one point in time. [01:14:23] S1: It's a really interesting way to think about it, where instead of we are trying to just get more customers closed and more deals closed, instead we're looking, we're building case studies, like almost like working backwards from what's the case study going to be of this company we're talking to, say we're talking to SpaceX, just like we want it to look consistent across all the companies we're talking to, people talk about, call this repeatable sales motions. But I like the idea of thinking about, like it's almost like working backwards from the press release, but for What is the case study we're gonna write about SpaceX? Okay, here's how we got them, here's how we got sold them, here's how we delivered it. Then the year is just like create like consistent repeatable case studies that you'll later be able to share.
01:14:23 · Lenny Rachitsky, Rob Snyder
[01:14:23] S1: It's a really interesting way to think about it, where instead of we are trying to just get more customers closed and more deals closed, instead we're looking, we're building case studies, like almost like working backwards from what's the case study going to be of this company we're talking to, say we're talking to SpaceX, just like we want it to look consistent across all the companies we're talking to, people talk about, call this repeatable sales motions. But I like the idea of thinking about, like it's almost like working backwards from the press release, but for What is the case study we're gonna write about SpaceX? Okay, here's how we got them, here's how we got sold them, here's how we delivered it. Then the year is just like create like consistent repeatable case studies that you'll later be able to share. [01:15:03] S0: And... Yeah. And exact... And then and then what sales becomes is it becomes kind of like, hey, this is the case study that we deliver on. Is this relevant to you or not? And it becomes actually like, you can show the case study to people, and they say, Yeah, that's actually what I want as well. And so it becomes this tool, and you can say, Yeah, you don't look like our case study, so it's probably gonna be a lot of work, and it might not be a good fit, and you can use it for qualification, disqualification, and for people to understand what you do.
01:15:03 · Rob Snyder, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:15:03] S0: And... Yeah. And exact... And then and then what sales becomes is it becomes kind of like, hey, this is the case study that we deliver on. Is this relevant to you or not? And it becomes actually like, you can show the case study to people, and they say, Yeah, that's actually what I want as well. And so it becomes this tool, and you can say, Yeah, you don't look like our case study, so it's probably gonna be a lot of work, and it might not be a good fit, and you can use it for qualification, disqualification, and for people to understand what you do. [01:15:30] S1: That's that's funny. There's this whole theme now of building software factories where, you know, product build itself, But there's a really another version of a factory you're building, is even the broader version of just the sales, the user, the case study factory. [01:15:45] S0: Yeah. Yeah. We don't make software here. We make case studies. [01:15:48] S1: So is that is that is that your advice? Just like think of it that way? Like we make we make case studies here. Yeah. It's interesting. And it's not like you need to actually share and write up a case study. It's just a mental model for how to think about what you're trying to build as an... A sales go to market org. [01:16:02] S0: Yeah. Totally. And and the good news is if you have the pull framework, then you just describe, here's how we helped them and what they accomplished, and you have a case study.
01:16:02 · Rob Snyder, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:16:02] S0: Yeah. Totally. And and the good news is if you have the pull framework, then you just describe, here's how we helped them and what they accomplished, and you have a case study. [01:16:12] S1: Amazing. Okay. There's a couple things I wanna touch on because this is the end of the process basically. Yes. There's a few things I wanna touch on that came out of the community and things you mentioned real quick. One is you... Yeah, this term hell yes customers. Say more about that. You mentioned it of like when you're looking for someone to buy it and then use it, there's this idea of they want them to be hell yes. [01:16:34] S0: Yeah. It's it's basically somebody who pulls the product out of your hands before they buy. And then afterwards, they use it as if it is addictive. And so they they might literally say hell yes, But what matters is they're weird not to buy and weird to churn, and that process is mostly them pulling versus you pushing. That's your perfect fit customer. Your job is just to find more who are basically clones of them. Okay. [01:17:02] S1: The other kind of point I wanna reinforce is you recommend no pilots, no point... Proof of concepts, no design partners. Just go straight to, we're gonna sell this to you and roll it out, it's gonna be amazing. [01:17:12] S0: Yep. And and, like, sometimes you're gonna do that and they say, okay. But the way we buy here is we actually need to pilot it. Okay. Cool. But don't proactively