Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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?
00:56:28 · Lenny Rachitsky, Oji Udezue
[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? [00:56:48] S0: I operate. I'm an operator right now, meaning that I'm building things. I work for a company. But I also advise and invest, which is different. When I'm advising, I'm looking from above, from outside. I have a bird's eye view, and I'm able to say, you know what? This will work. This won't work. What have you done? Can I look at the results and then, you know, cycle the advice based on what I'm? What you're seeing and what I'm seeing. When I'm operating, I'm I'm building a team, I'm hiring, I'm managing all the thing... Elena, shout out, that hates sometimes. Right? [00:57:26] S1: For now.
00:57:26 · Oji Udezue
[00:57:26] S0: And and that's what I'm doing. When you are operating, you you have the fog of war. Like, it is so intense that you don't have the attention to have a bird's eye view constantly. And so forest time is the idea that you make time within your week, within your month to see the forest for the trees. Most of the time when you're operating, you're seeing the tree, which is the problem in front of you. But sometimes you need to see the forest so you can figure out if there's an alternate path different from the one that you are currently on your campaign. And so it's time to elevate, to get some bird's eye view to see the entire landscape and see if there are alternative paths through the current problems that you're you're escaping. And I think that it has to be very intentional. And intentionality there is some... I have published a workflow, a document that helps you make that step, to make that elevation. Like, what are the issues? What are alternative ways to solve this potentially that I'm not seeing, etcetera? And what I try to do is I try to create that first time for my executive team as well because it's not just me that suffers from this, it's most everybody. In fact, it's most PMs, because PMs are so influential that it spoke of the wheel of product creation and product development that we often... You know, you're you're you're... It's a sine wave. Right? You are discovering and shaping problems, and then you are commanding and captaining execution, and it's endless. And there are endless meetings. And so you need to create time for forest time for elevation. If you don't, you become less effective over time. It's just attrition.