Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:48:47 · Oji Udezue, Lenny Rachitsky
It's hard to kill software that has reached network effect, although you can kill businesses that have reached network effect. [00:48:56] S1: That's a really important and interesting insight. I think what's even especially interesting about Twitter is Elon and the team have kind of, like, removed every other benefit of Twitter. Like, the brand gone. Employees, 80% gone. Like, every part of it is being cut off except for the network effects, and so it's a really cool case study. Dan Hockenmaier tweeted this. He was a previous guest of just, like, it's a good case study of what is just the power of just network effects. [00:49:19] S0: That's right. I think that people will... You know, when I did a really interesting course at Berkeley Business School, Haas, about technology companies and so on. And this is a perfect case study on network effect, the best I've ever seen. It is incredible. [00:49:35] S1: Yeah. That's why all threads isn't able to get there quickly, unlike what it felt like initially. [00:49:42] S0: I mean, threads will prosper, I believe. And they... Again, you know, it'll just be another click for advertisers who understand the Facebook marketplace versus the Twitter ad marketplace is much harder to access. And so I think the way Threads wins is the... Is a revenue spiral versus the, like, pure activity spiral. [00:50:02] S1: Interesting. Where essentially they find ways to, even with lower base, make... Generate revenue, which drives advertisers, drives more investment. [00:50:10] S0: Correct. Correct.
00:50:10 · Oji Udezue, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:50:10] S0: Correct. Correct. [00:50:11] S1: Awesome. Alright. That'll be funny... Fun story to watch. Kind of along those same lines, I wanna chat about virality a little bit. You worked on some of those viral products out there in b two c, as Twitter is an example, but also in b two b, which is really rare and interesting. And I know there's no silver bullet for increasing virality, but everyone's always wondering how do I increase the virality of my product. So I'm curious, anything you could share, any tactics that you've seen work to increase the virality, especially of a b two b product? [00:50:36] S0: Well, as is my style, I want people to understand what virality is in the first place because I think people have misconceptions about it. People think virality is some, you know, Hotmail's tag at the bottom that says, go get a free account. Virality is really when the word-of-mouth of a product is high quality. That's really the essence of it. Let me rephrase that. It's when customers market your product, right? And that is incredibly powerful, but also that's incredibly actionable, if that makes sense. There are products who try to be viral just for what I call synthetic virality that fail. Because in the end, if you're synthetically viral and people get to the product and it sucks, that's it. That's the end. Even Hotmail, for example, people talk about the viral tag. I don't know. You you know what I'm talking about? Because [00:51:32] S1: I Absolutely. At the bottom. Like, yes. Yeah.
00:51:34 · Oji Udezue
[00:51:34] S0: The top. But remember, it wasn't just that. It was one of the first Webmail things. And webmail was revolutionary because you you didn't have to have a POP three client and lose your email across multiple devices. It solved a lot of really good problems for customers at the time for email. And so when they arrived from the free account, it was like, holy crap. This is amazing. Right? And so let's let's do that. Uber doesn't have any weird viral traps, but it compresses the workflow of healing a cab so much that it... It's viral, if that makes sense. In fact, there's this time where Austin kicked them out for... And other apps came in and filled a void, and then it came back after the year and just crushed everybody. There was no no campaign. It was just viral by itself. So that's what virality is. So then the question is, how do you increase it? Well, look, fundamentally, build a great product that solves a sharp problem and build it really well. If you do this, this is the bedrock of virality. If you don't do this, there's no viral tactic that will work in a sustained way. Right? It will fizzle. But if you do this, you can layer on synthetic virality strategies for referrals, strategies for coming back to the app and creating an account. Right? Remember, before Calendly, there was acuity scheduling. There was other things. The difference was Calendly was so well made, so simple for schedulers, so respectful of schedulers' time, not just the creator's time, that the virality worked. It did not work for others who sucked. X.ai and other places. They weren't that good. You have to be good to be viral.
00:53:33 · Lenny Rachitsky, Oji Udezue
[00:53:33] S1: That is such an important insight that everyone looks at Calendly like, of course, you're sharing calendars with everyone, it's gonna go viral. That's a... Like, what a cool trick. But your point is so interesting that there's previous versions of that, but the product itself wasn't great. The experience wasn't great. It was too complicated. Didn't work. And that's the... What made it so viral. [00:53:51] S0: Yeah. There there there may be several things I think affect virality. What I think that this is the nugget that people need to take away, that is the foundation, the bedrock of of of all of them. Right? Like, customer support actually affects virality. Like, you have fanatical customer support, people will love it. Viral tactics like, you know, the page that says, well, get an account and so on doc... You know, you know, all these signing documents, Calendly and so on and so forth. You know, network effects as as, you know, in Calendly, you have these green dots. If you and a person have Calendly, it tells you when you're free. All network effects, really high quality execution, synthetic virality, all contribute to net virality, but the fundamental is exactly what we just discussed. [00:54:38] S1: Just gotta get it all right. No big deal. Build
00:54:38 · Lenny Rachitsky, Oji Udezue
[00:54:38] S1: Just gotta get it all right. No big deal. Build [00:54:43] S0: the best product possible. Honestly, if you wanna be viral, that's... You know, Slack wasn't even viral. Right? There was no synthetic virality. Slack couldn't even connect to organizations for the longest time. Why? You could be working on the 3rd Floor and so on using Slack on the 4th Floor, and you would have no clue. There's no way to share it with them. But what happens when you went to lunch? People are like, we got Slack, and this is amazing. And people on the 3rd Floor are like, holy shit. When can we get it? Boom. Boom. Boom. Great product first is virality. [00:55:14] S1: Seth Godin has this phrase I always come back to of you wanna make your product remarkable, something people wanna remark about. And that's basically the core word-of-mouth. [00:55:22] S0: Yes. Yes. Yes. [00:55:24] S1: I was watching a talk you did on this kind of topic, and you had this great phrase that you sort of touched on, but I think it's so good and I just wanna make sure we highlight it, which is that, virality is customer augmented marketing. Mhmm.
00:55:24 · Lenny Rachitsky, Oji Udezue
[00:55:24] S1: I was watching a talk you did on this kind of topic, and you had this great phrase that you sort of touched on, but I think it's so good and I just wanna make sure we highlight it, which is that, virality is customer augmented marketing. Mhmm. [00:55:36] S0: Yeah. I I think it's it's the thing that I started with first. It's it's when your marketing is essentially done by your customers, right? Because what it does, it affords you the ability to spend less on marketing. And you can either up level your marketing execution with that or save money that you can put in the product. Atlassian spends maybe like 10, 20 percentage points less on marketing than the equivalent competitors because it's viral, and also because there's network effects at this point as well, say Jira. And so it's customer oriented marketing. Your customers are either forcing other people to adopt it or shaming them into adopting it or formaling them into adopting it. So yes, virality is essentially customer oriented marketing, which gives you options. [00:56:28] S1: I love that phrase. I'm gonna use it now. I have just a few more questions before we get to our very exciting lightning round, and these are kind of random two topics that I wanted to chat on. One is this concept that you call forest time. It's a post you wrote about the importance of forest time. Can you just describe what that is and why it's so important and and then also just how to do this?